There’s something mesmerising about Deborah Levy’s writing. Once you get your hands on one of her books, you simply don’t want to stop reading. You can feel how deliberate each chosen word and phrase is, whereas the reading experience still feels light and airy. I have only read one of the author’s novels until today, “Hot Milk” and this is the first non-fiction piece of writing of hers that I went for. After it, I’m as motivated as ever to discover more by the author. Simply the way the book started here instantly drew me in:

That spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot and simply couldn’t see where there was to get to, I seemed to cry most on escalators at train stations. Going down them was fine but there was something about standing still and being carried upwards that did it. […] It was as if the momentum of the escalator carrying me forwards and upwards was a physical expression of a conversation I was having with myself.

p. 1-2

Within “Things I Don’t Want to Know” the author touched upon topics like what it means to be a writer but more importantly, a female writer, the position of women in society, other writers’ quotes that influenced her and what it means to be a woman in the current day society. You got insights into what her writing process might look like, the inspiration she gathers from daily observations but also into bits of her childhood, the past that shaped her into the person she is today. By the end of the book after just 163 pages I was left with the feeling of longing for so much more and luckily, in 2023, I’ll have the two other parts to this “living autobiography” to go through.

The trouble was that we too had all sorts of wild imaginings about what Mother should “be” and were cursed with the desire to not be disappointing. We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother.

p. 22

I thought about reducing one star from the final rating because the book felt a bit too much all over the place. There were some philosophical musings closer to the author’s present time, a long part diving into her childhood, so that the four different parts making up the totality of the book were very different in length. Some parts seemed so wacky, that you were left wondering whether they were really true or if they have been embellished by the author. When writing this review though, I realised that it’s also what I like the author for so much. The unpredictability, a bit of weirdness, parts that might feel to other readers like they’re dragging on, those were actually the ones where I really enjoyed her prose. The 5/5 ★ rating sums up the diversity of it to me. The fact how some parts were laugh out loud funny and others almost touched me to tears. I think that’s the most important qualitative marker of autobiographical writing.

It was now my extra job in the family (we all had jobs on Saturdays) to scrape the bees and honey off the drum with a teaspoon and dispose of the corpses. While I was on my hands and knees, head stuck inside the washing machine, it occurred to me that this was how suicidal women poets ended their life, except that they stuck their head into a gas oven. […] At least five of the bees had somehow gathered up enough energy before dying to sting my hand and no one was particularly sympathetic.

p. 121

If you enjoy reading about writers revealing themselves more personally, understanding their motivations, their daily lives – then you’ll surely enjoy this book too. Your voyeuristic tendencies will surely be satisfied, which is what is drawing me to soon read other books of a similar type such as Stephen King’s “On Writing“, Margaret Atwood’s “On Writers and Writing” or Chuck Palahniuk’s “Consider This“. It reminded me of Haruki Murakami’s “Novelist as a Vocation” that I read recently, so it might be interesting for you to discover too, if you have enjoyed this one!

★★★★★ (5/5)

_{Edition: ISBN 978-0- 241-98308-9
Penguin Random House, 2018 (first published in 2013)}