Real Estate: A Living Autobiography

"Three bicycles. Seven ghosts. A crumbling apartment block on the hill. Fame. Tenderness. The statue of Peter Pan. Silk. Melancholy. The banana tree. A Pandemic. A love story."Real Estate is the third and final installment in three-time Booker Prize nominated Deborah Levy's Living Autobiography series: an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the specters that haunt it in our patriarchal society. Virginia Woolf wrote that in order to be a writer, a woman needs a room of one's own. Now, in Real Estate, acclaimed author Deborah Levy considers the way she blazed paths for herself as an intellectual and an artist in rented writing sheds and turns her gaze to the restrictions that exist for a woman to have a place to work and to live. In this vibrant memoir, Levy employs her characteristic indelible writing, sharp wit, and acute insights to craft a searing examination of womanhood and ownership. Her inventory of possessions, real and imagined, pushes readers to question our cultural understanding of belonging and belongings and to consider the value of a woman's intellectual and personal life. Blending personal history, gender politics, philosophy, and literary theory, Real Estate is a brilliant, compulsively readable narrative.