Some people turn to drink to get them through their divorce. Deborah Levy turns to notable literary feminists. The result is a sad and thoughtful memoir about starting again at fifty. It’s also a little annoying. Levy (or her editor) aren’t shy, so there are lots of disconnected snippets of ordinary life, including a nice long list of what she can see in her study. This is in my experience a major red flag in terms of getting carried away with how literary we are. There is also some pretty appallingly bougey North London bits, as when her friend lends her a study. (Who has this kind of space? I’ll tell you, people with inherited wealth in N. London). Also, she seems to find riding with Uber drivers unnerving, because they use satnav:
It made them rootless, ahistorical, unable to trust their memory or senses, to measure the distance between one place and another. The River Thames, referred to by Londoners as the river, was of no geographical significance to the driver. It . . .was just one of many abstract rivers flowing through the abstract cities of the world.
That’s just called being an IMMIGRANT. I don’t know why she makes it sound like being rootless and ahistorical is a bad thing. For some of us, that’s just life.
Anyway, I’m not sure why I got carried away bashing on this book, because in fact I liked it. She has lots of little nuggets of wisdom, of which a few samples, below:
The writing life is mostly about stamina
It was obvious that femininity, as written by men and performed by women, was the exhausted phantom that still haunted the early twenty-first century.
It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them
This last, I read out loud to a man, to say how true it was, and he looked at me blankly. I don’t mock my desires, he said. One thing I think is true: men are often more successful than women simply because they take themselves more seriously
Lastly, I liked her perspective on how sadness can be a choice. She said hers was “. . . was starting to become a habit, in the way that Beckett described sorrow becoming ‘a thing you can keep adding to all your life … like a stamp or an egg collection.'” She looked at it specifically through the lens of the kinds of narratives we tell ourselves. Here specifically on divorce:
When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking. There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the black and bluish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels.
It’s a long time since I heard anyone use the word patriarchy without an edge of mockery. Patriarchy aside, I like the idea that you can pick or choose what story you are in