Things I Don't Want to Know

On Writing

By: Deborah Levy

Narrated by: Henrietta Meire

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, 15, and 50), Things I Don't Want to Know brings the listener into a writer's heart.

©2013 Deborah Levy (P)2013 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

An Intimate Journey

I stumbled across this audiobook through Audible. As a writer myself the title was alluring. Part contemplation, part memoir, I loved this intimate, observational journey, mostly told through the eyes of her childhood. It has inspired me to stay even closer to the present moment with my own life and work than I already am. The narrator has a sharpness to her voice that I began to really love. Not lyrical like other narrators, more matter of fact. A perfect pairing, I feel, with the story.

Very interesting book

A very interesting book. Whether the events were true or creative exaggerations of true events, I always wanted to find out what events or observations by the narrator lay in wait for me on the next page.