Redefining middle age for young women
To be a woman in the 21st century, as the Canadian writer Glynnis MacNicol recently pointed out, is to exist outside story. It is to have unhooked, or been unhooked from, a narrative arc that’s defined women’s lives for centuries. To find oneself suddenly tasked with making it all up from scratch.
As a result, many of us are at sea, rowing frantically, not sure which direction we’re headed in. Enjoying the ocean breeze, sure, but understandably anxious about locating a safe harbour.
The Booker-nominated British author Deborah Levy is aware of this need — for a beacon, for some fresh new story to guide us — and she’s begun composing a counter-narrative. The result is the first two volumes of her “living autobiography,” “Things I Don’t Want to Know,” about her 40s, and “The Cost of Living,” about her 50s. Both have been previously released in the U.K., and are now out in Canada.
And both are utterly spectacular. “Things I Don’t Want to Know” marks the unravelling of the storybook life: love, marriage, children. Levy finds herself “at war with my lot.” Bereft, perpetually weeping on escalators at train stations, she retreats to Majorca, where she rents a freezing room, “a refuge from The Family, “and contemplates the things she’s been avoiding thinking about. One of which is her childhood in South Africa, and particularly the period she went mute after her father, a member of the African National Congress, was jailed.
In the process of remembering — knowing the previously unknowable — Levy unpacks how she discovered her voice, both as an author and as a woman. The slim tome, an essayish memoir on writing and personhood and patriarchy, is poignant, poetic and deeply political.
In her exquisite followup, “The Cost of Living,” Levy tackles the Herculean task of dreaming up a new life. Of becoming the “major character” in her own storyline.
Having left her husband of 20 years — “my marriage was the boat and I knew that if I swam back to it, I would drown” — she moves her daughters from the family home to a dilapidated apartment in London. A friend loans her a chilly garden shed to write in, and she spends her days there, fashioning a new existence from words.
When she’s not doing that, she’s riding an e-bike to parties and meetings with film executives, fixing the plumbing in her ancient flat in her nightdress, and sharing roadkill roast chicken dinners with her teenage daughter and friends.
Not a bad life, all in all. Miserable sometimes, of course, but also happy.
And free in a way we are only now starting to understand.