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Things I Don't Want to Know
On Writing
Author: Deborah Levy
Narrator: Henrietta Meire
Unabridged: 2 hr 39 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: HighBridge
Published: 11/30/2021
Category: Biography & Autobiography - Women
Synopsis
A shimmering jewel of a book about writing from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory into a luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, Things I Don't Want to Know is Deborah Levy's witty response to George Orwell's influential essay 'Why I Write.' Orwell identified four reasons he was driven to hammer at his typewriter-political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism, and aesthetic enthusiasm-and Levy's work riffs on these same commitments from a female writer's perspective. As she struggles to balance womanhood, motherhood, and her writing career, Levy identifies some of the real-life experiences that have shaped her novels, including her family's emigration from South Africa in the era of apartheid; her teenage years in the UK; and her theater-writing days touring Poland in the midst of Eastern Europe's economic crisis, where she observed how a soldier tenderly kissed the women in his life goodbye. Spanning continents (Africa and Europe) and decades (we meet the writer at seven, fifteen, and fifty), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the listener into a writer's heart.