Real Estate charts the next logical step in that process, as Levy turns 60 and her younger daughter goes off to university, unshackling her finally from domestic obligations and forcing her to confront the question of whether the empty nest really offers the freedom for which she has yearned. A time of self-respect and perhaps a sort of homecoming.” In the chaos of this all-female household, she found creative liberation: “My 50s had been a time of change and turbulence, energetic and exciting. What does it cost a woman to make a home or to unmake one? The Cost of Living examined the author’s decision, in her 50s, to leave her marriage of 23 years and the family home that grounded it, and create a different kind of home, in a “crumbling apartment block” with her teenage daughters. In Real Estate, as in The Cost of Living, Levy is preoccupied with the meaning of home, that “gendered” space that has so long been regarded as the domain of women. These first-person narratives, “using an I that is close to myself and yet is not myself”, are at once memoir, cultural analysis and self-interrogation, attempts to keep past and present simultaneously in view as she pursues the question of how a woman – specifically a woman artist – should live in the second act of her life. Deborah Levy’s trilogy of what she calls “living autobiography” – Things I Don’t Want To Know, The Cost of Living and, now, Real Estate – has been an extended experiment with the form.
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