| Title | : | Things I Don't Want to Know : On Writing |
|---|---|---|
| Author | : | Deborah Levy |
| Release | : | 2021-11-30 |
| Kind | : | audiobook |
| Genre | : | Biographies & Memoirs |
| Preview Intro | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Things I Don't Want to Know : On Writing | Deborah Levy |
| 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. |
