I'm slowly becoming a huge fan of Levy's works, of both her fiction and her non-fiction. This first instalment of her memoirs portrays a narrative voice that I greatly enjoy, and a personality that even in childhood is hugely entertaining.

Candid, raw, emotional and evocative. I absolutely love Deborah Levy's writing, and it's a joy to read such an intimate memoir.

Deborah Levy is one of my favourite authors. I would read the telephone directory as rendered by her - it would reveal unexpected aspects to everyday living.

I was sent a copy of Things I Don't Want to Know by Deborah Levy to read and review by NetGalley. I love Deborah Levy’s writing and this, the first part of her memoir, is no exception. Looking back during a troubled time to her formative years, this book is beautifully written, emotional and also rather poetic. I didn’t want it to end so I immediately started reading volume number two as soon as it did! I wholeheartedly recommend it.

I love Levy's writing and this one did not disappoint. I have loved reading her memoirs. Thank you Netgalley for the copy.

Deborah Levy's writing is just so magical - I really enjoyed this and have already been raving about it to my friends!

I do not know how to describe this book without referring to the other books in Levy's living memoir. However, what I most appreciated about Things I Don't Want to Know is getting more insight into the author philosophy behind the writing - this made me re-examine what I considered about Levy's other texts. The Man Who Saw Everything is a favourite book of mine and I found myself enthusing because I finally felt as though I got exactly what I was supposed to do through reading this memoir, as well as getting to learn more about the author's life. This is memoir the way I like memoir to be written, using writing techniques to involve the reader, - masterful and superb.

There is so much noise surrounding writing today, tips, articles, special computer programmes, blogs, so it was intensely refreshing to read Levy's clear, direct and fascinating prose about why she writes and how she does it. The reader is by her side as she sobs through a flight, climbs a hill in darkness and remembers why inspiration is useless if you don't have the correct charger, and that reader will seek out her other work after reading this essay.

Raw and honest writing and an insight into the mind of a writer in her early days. Beautifully evocative and very real - I'm looking forward to reading the other two in the series.

I came to this, the first of Deborah Levy's three-part of "living autobiography", in the unusual position of having already read the second two parts, both of which are fantastic. Things I Don't Want to Know covers her early childhood in South Africa, her father's imprisonment under the apartheid regime, and her family's move to England. More importantly, however, it traces her desire to be a writer, from early childhood when she was both attracted and "scared by the power of writing" and the quite literal development of her voice, which significantly is too quiet to be heard in the early part of the book. Taken together, the three books are a remarkable achievement, powerful both in isolation and as a series. The Cost of Loving is my favourite but Things I Don't Want to Know is excellent too.

Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy is a memoir that covers her childhood in South Africa, her teenage years in exile in England and her later retreat as a writer to Majorca.

I just love this series of living memoirs, which give greater insights into Levy’s fiction by revealing her inner life - a vital companion piece of you’re a fan of her novels.

The first of Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography trilogy begins as a feminist response to George Orwell's essay "Why I Write". it's about motherhood and womanhood and growing up in South Africa the child of an arrested activist father. .It was written while she was living in Majorca thinking about writing her novel "Swimming Home" and tells a lot about her process of writing the book as she contemplates her experiences growing up.

Her father was a political prisoner imprisoned for 5 years for fighting apartheid and when he was released they fled to England and lived in exile. Levy talks about trauma and of not having a place that feels like home. All of those memories of having those experiences informed her writing of Swimming Home.She seeks out writing even as a child as a way to deal with trauma This is an incredibly illuminating book and I look forwared to picking up the rest of a trilogy.

The first book in Deborah Levy's autobiographical trilogy. This deals with her childhood in South Africa and her move to the UK, amongst other things.

One of the things I love about Levy's writing is that she doesn't really do linear narratives. Seen through the lens of her unhappiness and disintegrating marriage, she goes away to write and think and explore herself through her writing. What comes up are thoughts and feelings about her childhood that feed into her current situation.

I can't really describe quite how much I love these books (I have read the first two and am half way through book three now). They speak to me in a very profound way. I find myself asking myself the questions she asks herself and am intrigued by the answers, both hers and my own.

I make this book sound far dryer than it actually is. It is fully of beautifully funny scenes of every day life, of pin sharp portraits of the people she meets, of things that made me laugh out loud and cry into my sleeve. Just beautiful.

I was given an ARC of Things I Don’t Want to Know in exchange for an honest review. Based on events and characters in Deborah Levy’s life, the book tries to make sense of racial injustices inherent in the apartheid society of her early childhood in South Africa whilst wrestling with feelings of displacement in the unfamiliar environment of her adopted ‘Ingerland’. Things I Don’t Want to Know is the first book in Deborah Levy’s ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy and I can’t wait to start reading the second book.

I thought this was a response to Orwell's essay Why I Write but it barely touches on the concept of writing or the writer's life. Rather, it's more of a truncated memoir with Levy focusing on her childhood in South Africa, which is just weird for being unexpected. The writing is decent, the beginning part where she takes herself to a remote hotel to write is interesting, but I got less and less interested in the childhood memoir as it went on. Wasn't for me, mostly because I was expecting something different - a book about writing, rather than childhood. At least it's short.

Things I Don't Want To Know is a short and captivating memoir of childhood displacement, framed by a 'A Room of One's Own' narrative. Levy vividly reimagines selected scenes from her youth, exploring themes such as segregation, voice and belonging. She poses the question how do you go on living in world that breaks your heart, where systematic racism and sexism and all those 'things you don't want to know' constantly weigh you down?

While she covers some heavy-going topics, this first installment of her four-part memoir is surprisingly easy to read. The quiet child of Levy's memories has clearly found eloquence in her prose, deftly weaving theme with narrative in a way that is always immediate, always personal.

Things I Don't Want To Know is an accomplished piece of autobiographic writing, and I look forward to reading the next parts of her memoir.

A great first instalment of three books to tell a person’s memoir. Read this in a day, partly because it wasn’t too long and it was just captivating. I too have walked through a crowded place with tears running down my face, so this was a part of the book I could empathize with and the feeling of sadness really came across.
There were also parts that made me smile as I read them - her idea that if swimming pools were filled with tea, English people would put their heads under water.
Some of the more serious parts felt almost like a rite of passage occurring in her young life. All in all, extremely enjoyable and now for the next book.

This is the first volume in Deborah Levy’s Living Autobiography series of memoirs (later followed by “Things I Don’t Want to Know” but before “Real Estate”) this was published in 2013, two years after her Booker shortlisting for “Swimming Home”

“Swimming Home” was Levy’s first novel for 15 years – the break it seems largely being down to being a mother of two children, and she struggled for publication of it with major publishers before being picked up by (a then relatively new) crowd funded publisher “And Other Stories” (whose crowd funding subscription model is now hugely successful and alongside many successful books are also well known for their leading the way in the area of diversification - deliberately moving their base out of London and later having a year of only publishing Female authors).

This book is effectively a riposte to George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Reasons Why I Write” and examines over four sections each of his reasons (albeit in a different order): Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism and Aesthetic Enthusiasm.

The first section is largely set in Majorca to which she travels from London after a “spring when life was very hard and I was at war with my lot”. In London she finds herself crying when standing on up escalators and later becoming obsessed with a poster of the human skeletal system which she misreads as The Societal System – as she realises society is taking her to places she does not want to go. In Majorca she stays at a small and cheap hotel, thinks back on incidents in her life and reflects on the role of women, particularly mothers, in a patriarchal Societal System “fathered by masculine consciousness” as well as arguing against Orwell that “even the most arrogant female writer has to work overtime to build an ego that tis robust enough to get her through January, let alone all the way to December”. In addition in this and the fourth section (which returns to Majorca) she interacts with the locals in scenes which reminded me of her fictional writing.

The second section while perhaps simpler in a literary sense (and less reminiscent of her powerful fictional writing) is also the most powerful – an account of her time in South Africa as a young girl after her anti-Apartheid father was arrested and held in prison for four years, something which lead to the author developing a habit of speaking very quietly and then reverting to silence. As Levy said in a recent Guardian interview “It was really about being totally overwhelmed by everything, not believing that my thoughts were in any way valuable to anyone, probably very frightened thoughts, and so I just stopped speaking.”. This section explores how Levy eventually started to rediscover her voice through writing. One of the strengths for me of this section is how Levy as an adult conveys and explores her feelings as a child – in a way which to me seemed both true to the remarkable lived experience of a child but with the literary filter of an adult.

The third section was for me something of a misstep – looking at the author’s life as a teenager in England (where her family fled). For me this failed in precisely the way the second section succeeded being an uneasy mix between a rather cliched diary of a teenager “It was very urgent that I got out of my life”, some rather unlikely slapstick and a clunky analogy about missing lids.

The fourth largely concludes with a line that is key to the book and printed on the cover of some versions of it: I had to learn to interrupt, to speak up, to speak a little louder, and then louder, and then to just speak in my own voice which is not loud at all.".

Overall an extremely valuable read – thought provoking and beautifully written if a little uneven.

“Even more useful to a writer than a room of her own is an extension lead and a variety of adaptors for Europe, Asia and Africa.”

My thanks to Penguin U.K. for the invitation to review a digital copy via NetGalley of ‘Things I Don't Want to Know’ by Deborah Levy.

This is the first in Levy’s three part Living Autobiography. It was inspired by George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’.

In its four sections Levy reflects upon her personal journey to become a writer, including memories of her childhood in South Africa and later in the U.K. The autobiographical sections were filled with anecdotes that were amusing and poignant.

I have enjoyed a few of Levy’s novels and was quickly drawn into this memoir. Her writing is lyrical and elegant; yet also conversational and utterly absorbing.

I found this very accessible and felt drawn into her world. Given its modest length I read it in a single sitting and look forward to continuing with the other two parts.