An October morning in Paris. The British writer Deborah Levy, born in the Union of South Africa in 1959, sits in a rented apartment above the Marché Saint-Germain and waves at her computer camera. She wears red lipstick, pearl earrings and a blouse, her voice is warm and carrying. “Ein Eigenhaus”, the last part of what she herself called “living autobiography” trilogy has just been released, which New Yorker magazine aptly called the “Coming of Middle Age” trilogy. Levy, who lives in London, is currently in France promoting this last band. For the first two volumes she won the “Prix Fémina Étranger” there last year. Whenever she gets anywhere, the first question is always: Can I write here? Obviously it works here. You have already set upshe says and swings the computer around the room, taking the most important books with her, buying flowers yesterday. In the morning she has her coffee downstairs very early with the vegetable, cheese and fish vendors who are unpacking their goods, after which she works on her new novel upstairs in her makeshift home. It's about doppelgangers. We talk about Paris, the home, women and the eclectic, often contradicting voices within.often contradicting voices within themselves.often contradicting voices within themselves.
Your book “One House of Your Own” is the third and final part of your “Living Autobiographies”. How are you doing after completing this project?
I'm actually happy about it, I really enjoy writing my next novel and speaking through fictional characters.
But sometimes I see something on the street or hear something and would like to pass it on more directly than "I".
I then find it briefly sad that that doesn't work, but I also think you can't live if you just write about yourself all the time.
Your accommodation is currently in Saint-Germain des-Prés, near the Place Sartre-Beauvoir. Simone de Beauvoir is one of your great inspirations, you mention her a lot. She started writing autobiographies sixty years ago, around the same age as you, only in them she recorded her entire life, from childhood to old age. Why did you choose a trilogy? And why are you stopping now?
Of course, I ask myself that sometimes. I started when I was in my forties, the second volume was about my fifties and now about the sixties, and of course life goes on, it's not finished. But you are forgetting something essential: Simone de Beauvoir was a star when she started writing her autobiographies. She could assume that her life would interest people. That was not the case with me at all. I wasn't a bit famous when I started to write “What I don't want to know”, and I had no idea whether anyone would be interested in this search, this everyday life written down from the swing of life, and these perhaps banal thoughts. And above all, I didn't know whether it could be literature. I didn't want to write a guidebook.
How sure were you that they weren't advisors?
When I reread it, I found that something emerges from this associative writing.
A certain beauty, poetry, also a political point of view.
I liked the idea of giving a place to the thoughts of a woman my age.
And I discovered a voice in me that I didn't really know.
How did it sound?