Open Letter to Deborah Levy

Regarding her book, Real Estate

Dear Deborah Levy,

On impulse over three recent mornings, I re-read Real Estate, and again I am feeling the need to thank you for it.

I first read the book a few months after it first came out in 2021, but I hesitated to write back then, assuming there was no shortage of writers in their thirties and forties who also saw you as an oracle, a time-traveling hologram of the kind of woman we hoped to grow to be, speaking to us from the other side of our fifties.

With a book this personal and seemingly off-the-cuff, readers are prone to veer into the para-social, earnest and dreamy and a bit out of touch. Of course it’s wonderful when a sense of intimacy forms between a reader and a text, but I know a little of what it feels like to be projected upon by a stranger with good intentions and strong feelings they think you’re supposed to hear.

At the same time, I like writing to tell people that they’ve made something that moved me. With this book, though, I wondered— was I going to be too much…