Deborah Levy: My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein

The narrator of Deborah Levy’s latest fiction story, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, has gone to Paris to write an essay on Gertrude Stein, a writer who has baffled readers and critics for a century.

As Paris sweeps her along in its ceaseless flow, she thinks – about what we have to lose to become modern, navigating anxiety, living with uncertainty, angry fathers, making a new life in another country, art and language; about how all these things looked to Gertrude Stein in the early days of the 20th century; and how they look to her in the early 21st.

This is a book about how we put ourselves together – an exhilarating, witty, cosmopolitan meditation on the pleasures and challenges of friendship, desire and living with other people.

But it also crashes through genre to create an inspired portrait of Gertrude Stein herself: a writer who experimented fearlessly with a new way of living and who wrestled herself free from the nineteenth century to invent a brand-new way of looking at the world.

‘All writing is about walking ghosts. Or perhaps the ghosts walk the writer.
Towards our parents or something like them.
Towards our siblings and lovers and friends or something like them.
Towards the unknown. Towards the edge of a cliff.’

Deborah Levy is the author of novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger.

Josh Cohen is a writer and psychoanalyst. He is the author of books including The Private Life, Not Working, How to Live. What to Do., Losers and, most recently, All the Rage. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.