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? Reflecting on this “living autobiography” I couldn’t help but write with an intimacy similar the one it displays, so I’ve come to this solution of an open letter, like meeting a stranger in public for the first time.

Real Estate— a meditation on (among many things) the imaginary ideals of homes both literal and figurative— affected me tremendously and differently with each reading. Like the best books, it follows the inspired logic of a dream. I always felt carried along; every transition is inevitable, like one of those long conversations with a wiser friend that ends up setting you on the right course. The way your thoughts on the page were so often interrupted by quotes from books and the voices of your friends is thrillingly integral; the book’s form seems to have brought answers to the questions your life had raised.

My first reading of Real Estate came during at what felt like the first real clearing in my adulthood. After moving house almost yearly from the age of fourteen to thirty-four, I was suddenly a co-owner of a home where I felt certain I would live for a decade or more. I started acquiring books and rugs and breakable things with the verve and frequency of someone who would not have to pack them up anytime soon. I’d been living in that house about two years when Real Estate came out, and as I read it I had no idea my days were numbered in that house. I wonder what I would have told you if I had written a letter then. Perhaps I would have confessed (in some self-aware way) that I’d already managed to find my livable version of your “Unreal Estate.” I would have written that message to you in my former office, a room with skylights and floors I’d painted peacock blue and sealed with a glassy polyurethane.

The woman who’d lived in my Unreal Estate before me was a little older than you, and she’d lived there alone for about two decades before selling it to retire to Santa Fe. She’d renovated the place intricately, transforming that 130 year old house with storefront windows into something warm and mysterious. As I read Real Estate that first time I started to mentally conflate your narrator and the previous owner; my fantasy was that she was a lot like the woman inside this book— independent, strong, elegant, perceptive.

So, my first reading of Real Estate had a dreamy and fated quality, and though I felt secure in the trajectory of my life at the time, I was, in fact, surrounded by delusion, both lying to myself and being lied to. You know as well as I do that the things we’re sure about at the time and so obviously wrong about later are comic only in retrospect, never in the raw moment of realization. (This is yet another one of the things you’re able to write so clearly yet gently about in the book.)

In the three years between each encounter with the book, I lived in approximately fifteen different apartments and houses—friends’ places, mostly—but of course when you hold that many addresses in such a short period of time it’s not exactly living so much as it is moving. These moves were a necessity at first, then they were a series of decisions, then fate itself took over and had me at its whims. The reason I picked up Real Estate again is because my ambling does seem to be coming to a close. I found a place to really, finally, live for a long time (though I’m knocking on wood and looking over my shoulder this time). The new real estate is a world and a country away from the Unreal Estate. I am unpacking my books. I am taking things out of storage. I am, again, contemplating the real domestic stability at hand as opposed the imagined, eventual home.

Heidegger once wrote that “the possible ranks higher than the actual” and my best friend Sean (the equivalent of your “best male friend” in the book) once brushed off Heidegger by quipping that “anyone who’s ever had sex in a bathroom stall knows that to be true.” But I would say this actual home, after so much movement, ranks much higher than any possible home I might have. I think you came to a similar conclusion in the book, though your narrator has the advantage of twenty additional years to think and live this all through. How does the fantasy of the places we might live, or the books we might write, or the people we might love, create a contrast or a harmony with the places we do live, or the people we do love, or the books we have written? It seems we can only create a series of truces with this tension.

On this second reading I took greater notice of how your narrator tells the story of her peripatetic present against the backdrop of her past homes, past certainties, past relationships. On the one hand I feel very far away from whomever I was when I first read this book, but maybe that’s just because we tend to judge the most recent versions of ourselves the most harshly—a narcissism of small differences. Or maybe it’s true that the last draft I made of my values was totally misguided and I’m now piloting a self that has more in common with who I was as a child than who I was in an earlier stage of this adulthood.

Something else surprising happened in between these two readings: I wrote a book in the most present and personal tense after a decade of feeling at home in novels and stories. I think the voice of Real Estate (as well the two others in your trilogy) gave me a map for such a book a year before I knew I would need it. So on this second read I paid closer attention to the moments you explore the challenges of constructing a narrator in nonfiction—

She must not make herself too big or too small. That is to say, she must not constantly undermine herself in order to beg her readers to like her, nor must she make herself grander on the page than she actually is in life. It is hard to claim fragility and strength in equal measure, but that mix is what we all are.

The construction of female consciousness on the page—both in fiction and essay—is as much a subject of this book as the ongoing relationship we have with the fantasies and realities of our homes, and the two challenges are very much related. I think for this reason this will be a book I keep returning to, as it is my job, as it is yours, to find ways to honestly translate the experience of interiority into language.

Early on you encounter a twenty-year-old inscription in a novel from the husband you had since divorced: “To my Darling love for the last Christmas of the Century with 1000 years of devotion.”

It stops you in your tracks, unexpectedly, and you have this moment of looking across time at the young woman who first received this book and the woman holding it now:

I knew she would not want to see me (so there you are, nearly sixty and alone) and I did not want to see her either (so there you are, forty years old, hiding your talent, trying to keep your family together), but she and I haunted each other across time.

Hello. Hello. Hello

My younger self (fierce, sad) knew that I did not judge her. We had both lost and gained various things in the twenty years that separated us from the moment of my receiving this gift with its loving inscription. Now and again I got flashbacks to the family house. It was haunted by my unhappiness, and thought I tried to change the mood and find something good about it, the house would not oblige my wish to make a new memory of the mood.

It is, for many reasons, not easy to write such a passage, even if in the moment of its creation the language itself comes intuitively. This words and your generous sharing of them, are the result of decades of thinking, living, seeing yourself and others with clarity. As I read it this time I could see how my past Unreal Estate had, too, been haunted by my unhappiness, or maybe I’m over-identifying with your younger self, trying to use her keys to open doors in my own life. Or maybe this book has indeed become a kind of key of mine, like the books you cite here, by Marguerite Duras, Simone de Beauvoir, Katherine Mansfield, R.D. Laing, Leonora Carrington, Gaston Bachelard and others.

All along these pages you kept finding ways to deeply explore the exchange between daily life and writing life, worlds which sometimes seem to me to be parallel, sometimes entirely emulsified, and other times crossing each other like an unsteady Venn diagram, coming together and peeling apart. The book becomes a tool, a kind of microscope that I think any writer might use to simply examine that exchange—the way the walls in our lives have an effect on the walls we work between. And how they’re always movable.

Haunting you across time,

Catherine Lacey