The (Emotional) Cost of Writing

Memoirists might agree that the cost of writing is high. Yet, on the other hand, totally worth the price we pay.

Deborah Levy’s book The Cost of Living is notable for its technique, as exemplified in the ambiguity of the title. If the cost of living our lives economically features in every other newspaper headline, then the cost of living an emotional life features in most memoirs.

Levy’s memoir is short – always an advantage – with not a single word to spare. Its narrator, who is separated from the ‘father of my children’ , as she refers to her husband, throws herself further into her professional career, reconfiguring how she might align personal circumstances with her writing and still stay afloat.

The story opens with Levy observing th attempted seduction of a young woman by a self-absorbed older man at a seaside restaurant in Columbia. The younger woman has dubbed the man ‘Big Silver’. Levy assumes from his body language that Big Silver considers his female dining companion to be a minor figure in his main-character narrative. The young woman, in turn, is at pains to recount to him how she suspects a lover of having abandoned her on their recent scuba diving expedition. Big Silver has little interest in her plight, allowing Levy to muse upon this lopsided exchange as metaphor for her own push towards independence and autonomy.

Later, at a party one evening, an older man manages to monopolise Levy’s attention, while ignoring her at the same time. It’s a dynamic that will be familiar to many females. She’s rescued by a longterm gay male friend with whom she ends up dancing ‘as if it was our very last night on earth’. Reflection on other people’s relationships is a frequent ruse by which Levy seamlessly slips into parallels for her own. We gain a keener illustration of her life, in part because she observes how others navigate theirs.

Levy employs a clever if unobtrusive recounting of ‘patter’ between any two people to objectify what she terms ‘one person’s subjectivity’. Presumably she means the subjectivity of the memoirist. A conversation with the flamboyant Clara, her gay friend’s friend, allows Levy to reveal her newly formed status as single, whilst calibrating her own thoughts without the potentially indulgent ‘I’ pronoun.

There are other deceptively simple approaches to her art, such as her nine-year-old self meeting her forty-something persona. But for now, let’s leave the final words to Oscar Wilde. When Levy reflects on any power balance or rather imbalance between men and women, old or young, and the need for women to assert themselves, she recalls Wilde’s words: ‘Be yourself;’ he writes, ‘everyone else is already taken.’ It might be a good pronouncement for memoirists, and for human beings in general.