The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

A short, elegant memoir on writing sheds, motherhood, and finding a new voice after marriage falls apart.

Levy’s memoir feels both private and universal.

When Deborah Levy was around fifty, her marriage broke. A home was unmade and the family house sold. Levy went looking for life elsewhere - a life beyond Wife With Kids.

She moves to a shabby flat in London with her daughter, gets some plants, and sets about finding a place to write - a shed, in someone else’s garden. A shed with apples falling onto the roof, just like Virginia Woolf’s room of her own. A new domesticity develops. New freedoms. New philosophies. A new voice.

I did not know it then, but I would go on to write three books in that shed, including the one you are reading now. It was there that I would begin to write in the first person, using an I that is close to myself and yet is not myself. (p.45)

In short, intimate chapters Levy reflects on the stuff of life: mothers, childhood, life abroad, friendship, the portrayal of women in society, finding ways to pay the bills. Ordinary things around her - a moth, a bee, a sink plunger - become launching points for wider reflections. In The Cost of Living, Levy has created a memoir that feels both intimate and universal. Her writing is elegant and poised, sad and funny.

The Cost of Living is preceded by Things I Don’t Want to Know - which is Something I Do Want to Read - and is followed by Real Estate. I’m curious now to try her fiction.

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