The author on revisiting her early work, reading women writers – and the appeal of hypochondria
Born in apartheid South Africa in 1959 (her father was imprisoned for being a member of the ANC), Deborah Levy moved with her family to London in 1968. She started writing poems, plays and novels in the 1980s. Her 2011 novel, Swimming Home , a dark fable about a famous poet on a family holiday in the French Riviera, was published by the subscription-based press And Other Stories after having been turned down by mainstream publishers. It went on to be nominated for the Man Booker prize. Last year she published a collection of short stories, Black Vodka . Now Penguin is reprinting her 1994 novel, The Unloved, and two novellas, Beautiful Mutants (1986) and Swallowing Geography (1993), along with the paperback of her 2013 essay, Things I Don't Want to Know .
How does it feel to see new editions of books you wrote 20 years ago?
Amazing. It's like looking at an old photograph album of yourself and thinking, ooh, those are the clothes I was wearing then, and, where did I get those shoes?. The Unloved was written when I was pregnant and there's a photograph of me lying in bed in 1994 with my newborn baby girl and by my elbow are the proofs of the book. Beautiful Mutants was written when I was 27, during Thatcher's second term, very much a state-of-the-nation book.
Why was there a 15-year gap between your 1996 novel, Billy and Girl, and Swimming Home?
I was raising my kids, I was teaching, I was a fellow at the Royal College of Art. Maybe other female writers with children do better, but I need such ruthless attention when I write that it was very difficult to do that in the early days of my children. But I was writing short stories, and they became Black Vodka. So now, talking about my books, making a connection between works past and present, is a pleasure. I'm rediscovering things in the early work.
Many of Swimming Home's themes – exile, fathers and daughters, dreams – are present in your early fiction, aren't they?
Absolutely. In different phases of writing you do different things with accumulated experience. The heroine of Beautiful Mutants, Lapinski, is not born in Britain. Swallowing Geography is very much about home. Where is it? Is it family? Is it love? This is explored further in The Unloved, which is a rehearsal for the themes in Swimming Home. It's set in a villa with European and English tourists, and a North American female professor, whose colonial story I unravel. Then I look at the way the civil wars we have in our families translate into bigger wars.
Your autobiographical essay, Things I Don't Want to Know, is a response to George Orwell's 1946 essay, Why I Write . But it also examines how our childhood returns to haunt us, doesn't it?
It's really a portrait of the female writer as a child, in her 20s and in middle age. It spans two continents, Africa and Europe, so it's got an epic reach. I don't think work has to be 700 pages to have an epic reach. In the book the female narrator weeps every time she is on escalators; they are, as she discovers, an endless conveyor. And what is being conveyed to her is her past: her childhood in Africa.
Is it a feminist essay?
I look at the hard call that we so-called modern women have to answer: we are required to be passive but ambitious, maternal but erotically energetic. It's best not to take that call. As Marguerite Duras reveals so brilliantly in her book Practicalities, we put so much of our energy into creating a home for our men and our children that we have a talent for cancelling our own desires. In all my own books, far more important than being a female writer is, in my view, female subjectivity. So when we think about that old chestnut of men not reading female authors, well, you know, we can all read what we like, but I think if we don't read books by women, we're missing essential data.
Swimming is important in your books. Do you pound the pool yourself?
I swim every day – it stretches all those muscles that are cramped over a computer. It's good for thought drifts; swimming suits novel writing.
What are you writing now?
My next novel is about hypochondria. Hypochondriacs are referred to by GPs as "fat folder patients" because they require extensive notes. The GP takes a narrative of their symptoms – my subject – but hypochondriacs refuse to be diagnosed or fixed in someone else's story. And that's fascinating for me.
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