The Cost of Living
I struggled with this one. I recently read about Deborah Levy’s new book Real Estate: A Living Autobiography, not realizing that it is a third installment in a series. But I learned all this after I decided to check out the second in the series — The Cost of Living. (I’ve got Real Estate on hold!)
These are Levy’s ruminations on ending her marriage in middle age, working full-time as a writer, and the shabby flat in London she inhabits after saying goodbye to the family home. It is beautifully written — not to mention clever and artful. Yet I couldn’t help thinking that there was some disconnect going on here about privilege and class. Levy has some zinging commentary about women having to “make space” for men, but listen, I read this concurrent to watching Maid on Netflix. (PLEASE watch this.) Not that *any* of this is about me, but I kept thinking about how if Levy met me, she would likely label me as “basic and boring.” And if Stephanie Land, the author of Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive (full disclosure, I haven’t read this), met me, her first instinct might be to think of me as “overwhelmingly lucky.” In both cases, “privileged,” but perhaps that means different things to each of them.
These two works about women having to make their own way couldn’t be further apart in attitude and perspective. But should we expect one to mirror and complement the other? A life is a life and we can’t step in another’s shoes etcetcetc. However, at the end of The Cost of Living, Levy recounts watching a television interview with a Mexican woman who worked as a dishwasher in Las Vegas while raising seven children. She describes crossing the border. And this woman’s words “opened a space, a wide-open space inside [Levy]” because I guess she felt she could relate? Am I the doofus standing in front of a piece of art, not getting it? Am I reading into this odd recognition too literally?
Maybe this serves as a reminder that some books aim to confirm, while others aim to challenge. Or maybe it’s that reading a viewpoint that conjures annoyance reveals too much about oneself. (See, I can be navel-gazing as well.)
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