When writers write about other writers
Deborah Levy's new book makes me wonder if we're reading the wrong memoirs
Why do we trust writers to tell us about themselves but get suspicious when they write about other writers?
Deborah Levy's My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein apparently does something I didn't think was possible anymore: it makes Stein feel like a person instead of a literary monument. The Guardian's reviewer calls it "wonderfully entertaining," which honestly makes me more curious than any serious critical praise would.
But when Levy writes memoir (The Cost of Living, Real Estate), she has this way of making the ordinary feel charged with meaning.
So what happens when she turns that same attention to someone else's life? The review mentions that Levy "imagines conversations" with Stein, which sounds like it could go terribly wrong. But maybe that's exactly what we need. Not more scholarship about Stein's salon or her relationship with Alice B. Toklas, but someone willing to invent what it might have felt like to sit in a room with her.
I'm not sure this approach would work with every writer, but Stein seems perfect for it. She was already performing herself, already turning her life into literature. "A rose is a rose is a rose" isn't just wordplay. It's someone who understood that repetition can make the familiar strange again.
Levy writing about Stein now, when we're all supposedly questioning literary canons and who gets to be remembered.
The books I return to most often are the ones where writers drop their guard completely. In The Art of Racing in the Rain, Garth Stein lets a dog narrate the whole thing, which should be ridiculous but somehow isn't. The moment where Enzo watches Denny practice racing techniques in an empty parking lot, in the rain, over and over, tells you more about obsession than any straightforward memoir could.
Maybe that's what Levy is doing here. Using imagination to get at something true that straight biography misses. The parts of Stein that only exist in the spaces between the documented moments.
I haven't read it yet, but I'm already wondering if this is the kind of book that changes how you read everything else. The kind that makes you realize how many writers we've turned into statues when they were actually just people, sitting in rooms, trying to figure things out.
