REAL ESTATE

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and she is the author of highly praised books including Hot Milk, Things I Don’t Want to Know, and Black Vodka. Her novel Swimming Home was shortlisted for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, 2012 Specsavers National Book awards, and 2013 Jewish Quarterly Wingate Prize.

“The narrator of Real Estate is drily funny, irreverent, curious, even wise; she makes the reader want her for a companion.” —The Guardian

“The ordinary stuff of modern life, made radiant by Levy’s clarifying prose… [Levy] has taken on the exhilarating, excruciating challenge of trying to produce something new, in life and on the page.” —The New Yorker

“Sparkling with humor and Levy’s zest for life, Real Estate is a read for everyone who understands that home, though always familiar, can be found in the most unexpected of places.” —TIME

1. In moments throughout her book, Levy (also referred to as the narrator) grapples with the impossible expectations of motherhood. The narrator asks the reader, “What does maternal really mean?” (page 78) Reflect on this question. What defines maternal instinct? Are society’s expectations unreasonable, and if so, why? What would a realistic standard for motherhood look like?

2. Levy continually returns to the cinematic concept of the “leading female character” (page 86). She strives to envision her: both powerful and vulnerable, courageous, flawed, opinionated, solitary, sociable. On her travels, Levy sees parts of her in many of the women she meets along her way. Who are the female characters to whom we aspire, and why? What do you wish you could see in the female characters of future literary fame?

3. Throughout Real Estate, the narrator compiles inventories of her prized, and sometimes banal, possessions: antique wooden horses, a set of cutlery, a small jar of buttons. Her “property portfolio” is a list that is charged with meaning. Each item signifies a purpose or a wish, revealing her most intimate dreams and realities. Explore what your own property portfolio would contain. What are the items in your home that are important to you and why? Which item signifies a truth and which a wish?

4. Consider Rilke’s quote, “There is another world, but it is inside this one” (page 107). Speaking of her own apartment, Levy writes, “There were at least three other homes inside my London home” (page 125). Explore the concept of a life within a life. What homes and worlds exist inside of your own?

5. Explore how the narrator embraces her daughters’ freedom, and her own. How does she both mourn their absence and celebrate their independence? How do they do the same for her?

6. Discuss the quote: “If real estate were a self-portrait and a class portrait, it is also a body arranging its limbs to seduce” (page 7). What does this mean? In what ways is your own real estate each of these things? How do our own homes both represent us and tempt us to stray elsewhere?

One

LONDON

In the winter of January 2018, I bought a small banana tree from a flower stall outside Shoreditch High Street station. It seduced me with its shivering, wide green leaves, also with the new leaves that were furled up, waiting to stretch out into the world. The woman who sold it to me had long fake eyelashes, blue-black and luscious. In my mind’s eye her lashes stretched all the way from the bagel shops and grey cobblestones of East London to the deserts and mountains of New Mexico. The delicate winter blooms at her stall had me thinking about the artist Georgia O’Keeffe and the way she painted flowers. It was as if she were introducing each one of them to us for the first time. In O’Keeffe’s hands they became peculiar, sexual, uncanny. Sometimes her flowers looked as if they had stopped breathing under the scrutiny of her gaze.

“When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.”

Georgia O’Keeffe, quoted in the New York Post, 16 May 1946

She had found her final house in New Mexico, a place to live and work at her own pace. As she insisted, it was something she had to have. She had spent years restoring this low-slung adobe house in the desert before she finally moved into it. A while back, when I made the journey to Santa Fe, New Mexico, partly to see O’Keeffe’s house, I remember feeling dizzy when I arrived at Albuquerque airport. My driver told me it was because we were 6,000 feet above sea level. The dining room in my hotel, owned by a Native American family, had a tall adobe fireplace built into the wall in the shape of an ostrich egg. I had never seen an oval fireplace before. It was October and it was snowing, so I pulled up a chair in front of the glowing logs and sipped a cup of smoky clear mescal, which was apparently good for above-sea-level sickness. The curved fireplace made me feel welcome and calm. It pulled me into its centre. Yes, I loved this burning egg. That fireplace was something I had to have.