The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography

The Cost of Living is the second installment of Deborah Levy's "working autobiography," her label for a memoir series blending personal narrative with reflection on womanhood, creativity, and selfhood. The series began with Things I Don't Want to Know. Part memoir, part meditation on creative freedom, the book traces Levy's life during a period of upheaval in her fifties: the end of her marriage, the death of her mother, and her struggle to build a new life as a writer and single parent in London.

Levy opens with a scene set on Colombia's Caribbean coast, where she observed a young English woman and an older, tattooed American man sharing a table in a bar. The young woman told a story about a scuba-diving trip in Mexico during which she surfaced to find a storm, a narrative Levy recognized as a disguised account of emotional hurt. The man, whom the young woman nicknamed "the Big Silver" after her diving boat, dismissed her intensity and knocked her book to the floor. Levy reflects that it had not occurred to him that the young woman might consider herself the major character rather than the minor one. This dynamic, between women who must fight for freedoms men take for granted, frames the book.

Levy turns the diving metaphor on herself. She describes twenty years of apparent calm in her marriage as swimming in the deep. When she surfaced, she found a tempest and recognized that the marriage was the boat; swimming back would mean drowning. She grieves for her ideal of enduring love but acknowledges she has rarely witnessed it. At a funeral, she met a man who wept openly for his long-time male lover. He told Levy that love had "signed its name in the visitors' book but never moved in" (9) in his own life. When Levy shared her situation, he told her she would be better off finding another way to live.

Levy and her husband sold the family house. The act of dismantling the home she had spent years creating recalled her departure from South Africa at age nine and gestured toward an unknown future at fifty. She reflects on the invisible, undervalued labor of homemaking, work still perceived as belonging to women, and describes unmaking a family home as breaking a clock. She and the father of her children agreed to live separately but remain united in their daughters' lives, asserting that it was the patriarchal story, not the family, that had been broken.

That November, Levy moved with her daughters into a flat on the sixth floor of a shabby art deco apartment block in North London. The communal heating broke down, the hot water shut off, and her older daughter left for university, shrinking the household to two. Most of her books remained in boxes in the garage. She had no study during the busiest professional period of her life, yet she found the chaos freed something in her. She became physically strong out of necessity, doing all the heavy lifting and writing to support her children. She wrote on the tiny balcony at night, exchanging her former book-lined study for the winter sky.

Celia, an actor and bookseller in her early eighties, rented Levy the shed at the back of her garden, where her late husband, the poet Adrian Mitchell, had once written. The shed sat under an apple tree and contained Mitchell's writing desk, Formica bookshelves, and the ashes of his golden Labrador, Daisy the Dog of Peace. Celia, fierce and protective, introduced Levy to friends as "She Who Lurks in the Garden" and forbade anyone from interrupting her work. The shed had spiderwebs, dust, and a wheezing freezer full of quartered apples, but Levy draped sheepskin rugs over her chair, brought only ten key books, and began writing. Each evening, she walked up one of the highest hills in London to cook supper for her daughter, pausing by the local cemetery gates, feeling she was passing from one life to another.

Levy bought an electric bicycle, which became central to her daily life. She rode fast, channeled suppressed anger onto the road, and clashed with Jean, a fellow resident who insisted Levy could not park even briefly in the front car park. Jean's obstruction triggered a memory of a Tuesday years earlier when Levy and the father of her children watched Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence, a film about a robot boy programmed to love who is abandoned. It was during that film that Levy knew her marriage was over. At a party, she encountered another tall, silver-haired man who talked only about himself, and she mentally dubbed him "the Big Silver," echoing the dynamic from the Colombian bar. The man who cried at the funeral arrived with his new partner, Geoff; love had now moved in. Levy declares that femininity as she was taught it has come to an end, an exhausted phantom written by men and performed by women.

Levy reflects throughout on the expectations placed on women. In her shed, she researched the Medusa myth for a new novel, reading it as the story of a woman punished for returning the male gaze, her decapitation symbolizing the severing of a woman's mind from her body. She considers women who have made homes for everyone else but do not feel at home themselves, and men who hide behind the mask of patriarchy. She references George Orwell's observation that the imperialist wears a mask and his face grows to fit it.

A year after the move, Levy's mother became fatally ill with cancer. In her final weeks, the only thing she could swallow was a particular brand of ice lolly. Levy bought them daily from her local newsagent, run by three Turkish brothers. One day the shop stocked only bubblegum flavor. Levy shouted at the youngest brother, then cycled to the hospital and held the bubblegum lolly to her dying mother's lips, but her mother grimaced and refused it. When Levy recounted her outburst, tiny sounds came from her mother. She was laughing, and it became one of Levy's most cherished memories. After the funeral, Levy returned to explain her behavior. The brothers said they would have gone to the cash-and-carry to buy lollies in bulk. They all laughed together, and Levy felt a release from the terror of death.

Levy reflects on her mother, who was born in South Africa and longed for the sea during four decades in North London. Her mother had escaped her upper-class family to marry a penniless Jewish historian and became involved in the struggle for human rights in South Africa. When Levy's father became a political prisoner, her mother's fast typing skills fed and clothed her children. Levy recognizes that society sends mothers impossible messages: If a mother moves beyond service to become a self, she is seen as transgressing her mythic role.

After her mother's death, Levy lost her sense of geographical direction. She stopped riding the e-bike and began using cab apps, but the GPS-guided drivers were frequently lost. Levy connects this disorientation to the loss of her mother, her first landmark, whose body had been her primal navigation system. The man who cried at the funeral took a week off work and became her chauffeur. Clara, a colleague of the man who cried at the funeral and an academic from South America researching popular uprisings, began swimming with Levy and cooking at her flat. At St Pancras station, waiting for the Eurostar train to Paris, a suppressed memory surfaced: The train ride her family took from Southampton to Waterloo after emigrating from South Africa in 1968 was not the happy journey she had always told herself it was. She was nine, anxious, her mother's hands shaking. On the Eurostar, she entered a dreamlike reverie, imagining her nine-year-old self crossing London to find the Victorian house where her adult self would make and unmake a family home.

The book closes as Levy and the father of her children meet in a coffee bar to plan Christmas. A Joni Mitchell song about hating and loving someone played through the speakers; they pretended not to notice. They were still angry but calm. Levy recognizes that they had made a pact from the start to know less about each other rather than more, the fatal flaw that tore them apart. She recalls a television interview with a middle-aged Mexican woman who described crossing the border alone, feeling "the black and bluish darkness, the howling of the coyotes, the sound of the plants" (133). Levy connects this to the experience of any woman who breaks from the societal story that has erased her name. She rejects the suffering and self-hatred that society prescribes for such women, calling them "the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy's crown" (133), and asserts it is better to walk through the darkness. Quoting Marguerite Duras on writing coming like the wind, naked and made of ink, Levy closes with a final declaration: "The writing you are reading now is made from the cost of living and it is made with digital ink" (134).