In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Deborah Levy responds to George Orwell’s essay Why I Write by reconsidering the relationship between writing, gender, memory and the political conditions of a woman's life.

Moving between childhood in apartheid South Africa, adolescence in England and a period of personal crisis in Mallorca, Levy constructs a memoir around Orwell’s four proposed motives for writing — political purpose, historical impulse, sheer egoism and aesthetic enthusiasm. Levy examines how these categories change when considered from the position of a woman whose ambitions have been shaped by domestic expectations, political violence and the demands of motherhood.

Memories of her father's imprisonment, encounters with literary history and the ordinary humiliations of everyday life become part of an inquiry into whose stories are permitted to matter. The first volume of Levy's Living Autobiography trilogy, this is a spare, searching work about the relationship between personal experience and the larger structures that determine how it can be told.

Edition/Condition: Penguin Books, 2018 edition. Originally published by Notting Hill Editions in 2013. Paperback. Very good condition, with light surface wear to the covers. Interior appears clean and well maintained.