Things I Don't Want to Know

Deborah Levy's memoir responds to George Orwell's 1946 essay "Why I Write." Its four chapters mirror Orwell's four motives for writing: Political Purpose, Historical Impulse, Sheer Egoism, and Aesthetic Enthusiasm. Through layered memories spanning South Africa, England, and Majorca, Levy traces how she became a writer, connecting her childhood under apartheid and her struggles as a woman and mother to the act of putting words on a page.

The memoir opens during a spring of personal crisis in London, when Levy found herself crying on escalators at train stations. She was at war with her lot. She read Gabriel García Márquez's Of Love and Other Demons as comfort, fixating on a character who escapes her marriage through cacao and fermented honey. On the verge of collapse, Levy booked a flight to Palma, Majorca, where she had stayed before at a quiet mountain pensión, a small, austere guesthouse.

After a reckless taxi ride and a wrong turn into the forest, Maria, the hotel's owner, found Levy on a rock and guided her back. Levy had visited the pensión in her twenties while writing her first novel and again in her thirties, when she was deeply in love. Now the room felt different; the wire hangers in the wardrobe seemed to mimic forlorn human shoulders.

Levy unpacked three items: Márquez's novel, George Sand's A Winter in Majorca, and a notebook labeled "POLAND, 1988." The notebook documented a trip to observe a production by the Polish actress Zofia Kalinska. Kalinska insisted that form must never be bigger than content and that speaking up is not about volume but about feeling entitled to voice a wish. Levy recognizes these ideas as guides for her own writing. Material from the notebook later appeared transformed in her novel Swimming Home.

The next morning, Levy heard Maria sobbing over the washing machine. Maria composed herself and served breakfast; neither woman asked about the other's life. Levy reflects on Maria as a woman who never married or had children, who built a refuge from family life though her brother controlled the finances. Invoking Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir, Levy argues that women secrete their despair as wives and mothers and that the maternal instinct can become a refuge that turns into a prison. She acknowledges that her own tears on escalators were a refusal to see what was wrong in her situation.

Levy visited the village grocery, run by a Chinese man from Shanghai, and walked to the Carthusian monastery where George Sand and her companion, the composer Frédéric Chopin, spent the winter of 1838–39. That evening, the shopkeeper joined Levy at a restaurant table. He told her about his years in Paris, then tapped her arm and asked if she was a writer. Levy could not answer, sensing the question asked something deeper. When he asked where she was born, the question prompted the story that fills the memoir's second chapter.

Levy returns to 1964 Johannesburg. She was five years old and it was snowing, a rare event. She and her father built a snowman with ginger biscuits for eyes. That night, the security police arrived and took her father away for his opposition to apartheid, South Africa's system of enforced racial segregation. Levy spoke to the snowman in her head, and it told her that her father would be tortured and she would never see him again.

Zama, her Zulu nanny whom the family called Maria, comforted Levy and explained that people who oppose apartheid can go to prison. Zama had a daughter Levy's age named Thandiwe, who once bathed with Levy but was not allowed in the house because she was Black. When Thandiwe had to leave for the "Blacks Only" bus stop, she cried violently. By morning, the snowman had melted, disappearing like Levy's father.

Two years later, Levy's father was still imprisoned and her voice had gone quiet. At school, her Afrikaans teacher punished her for always starting to write on the third line, and the headmaster, Mr. Sinclair, slapped the backs of her legs. Levy began to understand that she was less safe with white authority figures than with the Black children she watched searching through the school dustbins. She walked out of school to a park where a sign read, "This play park for European children only."

Her mother sent her to Durban to stay with Godmother Dory, who kept a caged budgie named Billy Boy. Dory's menacing husband, Edward Charles William, called his Black gardener, Joseph, "boy." Joseph had lost two fingers to a police dog during a raid searching for anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela. Dory's seventeen-year-old daughter, Melissa, became Levy's first encourager to speak up. Melissa had a forbidden relationship with an Indian man named Ajay, and when Edward Charles William discovered it, he called Melissa a racial slur and banned her from driving.

One morning, Levy wrote a list of everything she did not want to know: her father's disappearance, Thandiwe's tears, Joseph's missing fingers, Billy Boy behind bars. She opened the cage and the window, and Billy Boy flew free. Godmother Dory called the airline, and Levy was sent home. Before she left, Sister Joan, a nun who had taught her French and introduced her to the power of reading, buckled her shoe and blessed her forehead.

Her father returned after nearly five years, thin and pale. He said he had not seen a glass in five years and had to relearn how to handle a cup. He asked to see the snowman, but there was no snowman. Two months later, the family left South Africa by ship for England. Levy's last preserved memory is of Zama sipping condensed milk on the veranda at night, resting from myths about her character and purpose.

In 1974 England, fifteen-year-old Levy sat in a greasy spoon café in West Finchley, writing "ENGLAND" on paper napkins, trying to impersonate a writer. Her parents had recently separated. At home, the Egyptian au pair Farid raged about the family's inability to put lids on jars. Levy recognizes the missing lids as a symbol of displacement: Like the family, the lids did not have a place. She knew she wanted to be a writer more than anything but did not know where to start.

The final chapter returns to the Majorcan evening. The Chinese shopkeeper walked Levy to the hotel and told her that as a young man in Paris, he saw two cops stop a North African boy and punch his stomach. He shouted "Stop" in his broken French, and the cops walked away. At the hotel terrace, the shopkeeper and Levy kissed. He gave her his coat and told her she needed to dress properly for the weather she found herself in.

Levy entered the room Maria had prepared before departing with a small suitcase: a warm space with a fire burning and a writing desk by the window. She connects Maria's departure to George Sand's restlessness and Zama's endurance, all three women on the run from myths about their character and purpose. The mute piano in Maria's hallway, polished daily but never played, mirrors Levy's own state of being shut down. She recalls a line from the poet Guillaume Apollinaire: "The window opens like an orange." These fragments connect to the central question of her unpublished novel, Swimming Home: What do we do with the things we do not want to know?

Levy sat at the desk and looked for a power outlet. The only one was a precarious socket above the basin. She concludes that 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, a final image connecting practical necessity, geographic displacement, and the act of writing.