Real Estate by Deborah Levy

The third in Deborah Levy’s elegant series of memoirs. After unmaking the family home, Levy is in search of a new one - imaginary or real.

Are you happy pretending to be unhappy? Or unhappy pretending to be happy?

London, New York, Mumbai, Paris, Berlin. Iconic cities, home to millions. But how about a home for one? Now 59 years old with a broken marriage behind her, Deborah Levy constructs fabulous homes in her imagination, decorating them this way and that. A well. A stream. A pomegranate tree. Redecorating an imaginary home is the work of an instant.

But what about recreating the self? It takes more than a new pair of sage green shoes.

Levy’s prose is elegant and playful, looping back to earlier references to riff off images and expand ideas. A line about a tiger in one chapter becomes a joke about tigers in the next. It’s very pleasing. Real Estate feels like something between a diary and a friendly chat over wine and olives.

In chapter 4, Levy wonders why the roles of mothers, grandmothers, great-aunts, and spinsters are always seen as demotions in film scripts. Their roles are either to comfort or police the more exciting characters, or to dole out wisdom. What would a middle-aged female heroine be like? Or an old-aged female heroine? A female rogue, lusty and alluring, travelling the world with barely a thought for her children, while having incredible adventures and living by the skin of her wits… Why will no one buy this script?

… I reckoned the narrator had to do something that is tricky in life, never mind in a book. She must not make herself too big or too small. […] she must not constantly undermine herself in order to beg readers to like her, nor must she make herself grander on the page than she actually is in life. (p.256)

As with the previous volume, The Cost of Living, it was a pleasure to be in Levy’s frank and philosophical company.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett