Dazzling, essential, unlike anything else published today - a memoir on modern womanhood, smashing through social expectations and making the case for thrilling, transformative freedom.
Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy- Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about
this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about
the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the
death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't
think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes
better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it
is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It
is about how to find a new way of living
*Observer*
Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp
insights
*Financial Times*
It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended
her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the
needs of everyone except herself... A piece of work that is not so
much a memoir as an eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls 'a new
way of living' in the post-familial world
*Guardian*
Ingenious, practical and dryly amused... This is a manifesto for a
risky, radical kind of life, out of your depth but swimming all the
same
*New Statesman*
Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer... Each
sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise. That shed
should be endowed with a blue plaque
*Telegraph*
A heady, absorbing read
*Evening Standard*
This, from Deborah Levy, is exceptional. A memoir of life, art and
separation. How to write when you're broke, have no writing space,
are a parent. Also: crushed chickens, electric bikes, plumbing. Out
in May and an early contender for one of the books of the year
*Sinead Gleeson*
Both memoir and feminist manifesto, her writing focuses so sharply
on what it means to be alive that she's given me much-needed
clarity...Levy subtly informs us about what it is to be a
woman.
*Vogue*
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