In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Levy is white, fifty-something, and beginning to experience considerable traction in her fiction-writing career, on the back of a Booker shortlisting. She travels to Majorca to write, and reminisces about her childhood in apartheid South Africa. In The Cost of Living, Levy is white, fifty-something, has divorced her husband, and is reckoning with newfound singledom while her career continues to flourish. In Real Estate, Levy is almost sixty years old, and her book’s central conceit is that, though she would like to own a mansion, real estate is expensive, and as a single woman writer, albeit a successful one, her economic situation remains relatively precarious.

The world is different in 2021 to what it was in 2013, and not just because of the global pandemic. In 2013, the #MeToo movement had not yet swept the globe. Trump’s presidency had not roused an international series of Women’s Marches and popularised intersectional feminist discourse online. Para-academic, autobiographical tomes on feminism and late capitalism (think Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist [2014], Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror [2019], and Lola Olufemi’s Feminism, Interrupted [2020]) did not fill the counters of independent bookstores the English-speaking world over. Rachel Cusk was yet to publish Outline (2014), let alone Transit (2016) or Kudos (2018): white, middle-class, writerly introspection with a quasi-feminist bent was not yet the genre du jour.

In many ways, then, Things I Don’t Want to Know was ahead of its time. Despite Levy’s penchant for cringe-worthy metaphors (‘I suddenly knew why the lids for honey and ketchup and peanut butter were never in their right place in our family house. The lids, like us, did not have a place. I was born in one country and grew up in another, but I was not sure which one I belonged to’), Things I Don’t Want to Know was a culturally relevant book. It was complex and confident, and it also had some level of self-awareness. Levy was genuinely invested in thinking about why and how she wrote, how her gender and age inflected expectations of her writing, and how her experience spoke to more structural gendered inequities.

In Real Estate, Levy is no longer as concerned with how her own struggles might relate to broader injustices. Nor does she seek to examine how the difficulties she faces might be different, and likely amplified, for women who do not share her racial and educational privileges. Levy is concerned with herself, but she offers little reason for readers to be similarly concerned. The potentially galling, self-important writerly affectations that I accepted in her previous works as charming idiosyncrasies no longer act as asides. In Real Estate, self-importance reads as the rule rather than the exception.

Alongside laments about the state of the London property market, Levy imagines what characteristics she might bequeath to the female protagonist she is now imagining. She wants this protagonist to ‘follow her own desires’, for she is sick of women being minor characters. She then goes on to note that the Hollywood-types who want to turn her books into films are not enamoured of this idea. Do these observations make Real Estate feminist?

For most of the book, Levy travels to writers’ festivals and wins lots of literary awards and becomes obsessed with silk. ‘When I replaced the silk with the cotton sheet on which I had slept all my life, it suddenly felt very harsh on my skin.’ She cooks gourmet meals and enjoys guava ice cream. She thinks about being single at her age and decides that she is okay with it. She commits to the motif of ‘unreal estate’ – that is, the possessions she imagines herself owning, but does not. In keeping with this theme, she makes such astute observations as the following, about keys: ‘There is always something secret and mysterious about keys. They are the instrument to enter and exit, open and close, lock and unlock various desirable and undesirable concerns.’

It turns out real estate has been a metaphor all along. Levy ends the book by consoling herself that her writing is her real estate. She says, ‘Language is like a building site. It is always in the process of being constructed and repaired. It can fall apart and be made again.’

The year is 2021. A celebrated, sixty-year-old, straight, white, widely published female author coming to the freeing conclusion that her words are her capital seems at best laughably naïve. In Things I Don’t Want to Know, Levy recontextualises Orwell’s essay sub-headers as her chapter titles, and then examines how her own experiences in these realms have not accorded with his. In doing so, she evidences the gendered expectations that inhere in Orwell’s claims. But Real Estate makes no such formal interventions: sections are simply divided by the cities in which Levy spends her time.

Queer Latina author Carmen Maria Machado’s memoir In The Dream House (2019) also uses the metaphor of property for thinking about memory and self-construction. For Machado, this metaphor manifests in an entire re-visioning of the memoir form. In the Dream House’s section titles, such as ‘Dream House as Bildungsroman’, ‘Dream House as Legacy’, and ‘Dream House as Public Relations’, refract generic expectations about what constitutes the foundations of memoir.

Levy’s living autobiography series began with much promise, but Real Estate feels rushed and out of touch. It might be time for Levy to put down the mirror and pick up Machado’s book instead. She could read it while eating guava ice cream, made with the ice-cream maker she was given for her sixtieth birthday, which she spent in Paris in a rent-free apartment paid for by a fellowship.