Writing About Small Things; Giving Women Writers Their Due

 The Guardian interviews Deborah Levy: Deborah Levy: ‘A writer’s career is choppy – I was 50 when I found success’.

But why shouldn’t Levy range up and down the creative spectrum? Those idols about whom she writes in the book have all made similar journeys, and Levy is at her most thrilling when defending their right, and the right of female artists more generally, to change direction without getting it in the neck. Take Lee Miller, the Vogue model turned war photographer recently depicted by Kate Winslet. Endless words have been spent trying to understand what Miller thought she was up to, and yet, says Levy, “you don’t really ask how Cocteau put himself together. Cocteau, who I’m very fond of as an artist, could be a director and a critic and a novelist and a film-maker and a poet and a visual artist and a designer. No one’s saying: Jean Cocteau, how did you fit together?”

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Really, what Levy is writing about in this mode is delight and the joy contained within small things. The Cost of Living, for example, considers the possibility of creating “a utopia in a modest way. When you say that word utopia, it sounds so grand and unobtainable. But in the most modest living space, you know, you can put a table down, and place some chairs around it, and curate the table. Who are you going to invite to that table? And in this arrangement of space, you’re creating something like the life you want. No matter how modest. No matter how grand. The light’s coming in this way, the chairs are arranged this way. This is a small, utopian gesture. But because it’s supposed to be domestic – oh no!”

This is why people love Levy: she has an uncanny ability to honour and redeem aspects of experience routinely dismissed as trivial. In her fiction, meanwhile, characters are inclined to undertake sudden, sometimes dizzying, often baffling changes of direction. In her 2012 Booker shortlisted novel, Swimming Home, this entailed Kitty Finch, a terrible driver, tearing around a bunch of hairpin bends while the man she is with clings on for dear life. Levy has always been bold, she says; there was no sudden midlife change in outlook. When she wrote her first novel, Beautiful Mutants, on a typewriter in the late 1980s, “I had a very particular black eyeliner, silver platform boots, a lot of mascara and a cigarette,” she says. “And there’s nothing that isn’t bold about that book. There’s even a long conversation with a llama in London zoo. That book is about a female banker who feels so powerful and invincible … It’s a kind of state of the nation book, written in the Thatcher years. And you could say that women weren’t allowed to write state of the nation books, and how that book was read then and how it might be read now is different.” 

Why do we ask different questions of women than of men? We saw this during the election in how Harris was asked different questions than Trump. The press gave her a different slant than Trump.

As writers, as human beings, we should treat women in the same fashion as we treat men. Writers, as creative people, ought not have to be told this.

And I like the idea of small things having important stories to tell.

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