“The Cost of Living” by Deborah Levy: Indications of multiple personality trait in memoir by two-time Booker Prize finalist

A published review of this memoir begins as follows: “In her first novel, Swallowing Geography, the English novelist and playwright Deborah Levy described a character becoming ‘many selves in order to survive. Through observation, study, and meditation she taught herself to change from one self to another, from one state to another.’ It's an early, tossed-off line, but it predicts Levy's whole body of work. Over and over, this is the story she tells: First a woman learns to change selves, and then she chooses, defiantly, to be the one self she likes best” (1).

From my own reading of this memoir, I would highlight Levy’s sleeping habits as an adult and selective mutism as a child.

“When I was travelling in Brazil…I could not decide which part of the bed I wished to sleep on. Let’s say the pillow on my bed faced south; sometimes I slept there and then I changed the pillow so it faced north and slept there too. In the end I placed a pillow on each end of the bed. Perhaps this was a physical expression of being a divided self…of being two minds…” (2, pp. 6-7).

There was “a year in my childhood when I did not speak at all” (2, p. 94), which happened during her father’s political imprisonment by the apartheid government of South Africa. Selective mutism may sometimes be indicative of dissociative identity disorder (multiple personality disorder) (3).

1. Lily Meyer. “The Cost of Living.” NPR, July 14, 2018. https://www.npr.org/2018/07/14/628215245/in-the-cost-of-living-renouncing-serenity-for-a-life-in-motion

2. Deborah Levy. The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography. New York, Bloomsbury, 2018.

3. Jacobsen T. “Case study: is selective mutism a manifestation of dissociative identity disorder?” J Am Acad Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 1995 Jul;34(7):863-6. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7649956