Reading List

Authors Like Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy was born in Johannesburg in 1959. Her father, the historian Norman Levy, was a member of the ANC, and the apartheid government placed him under a banning order from 1964 until the family left for London in 1968. She trained at Dartington College of Arts, wrote plays and novels through the 1980s and 1990s, and was in her fifties when Swimming Home (2011), set in a villa above Nice, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Hot Milk followed it onto the shortlist in 2016. Between the novels she wrote three short books she calls a “living autobiography”, from Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013) to Real Estate (2021), about writing, motherhood and starting again after the end of a marriage. The ten writers below share her subject: a woman working out, on the page and in public, what kind of life she is free to make.

By Lisanne Swart · 10 authors · Autofiction · Living autobiography · Updated October 2026

Quick answer

If you like Deborah Levy, start with Rachel Cusk, whose memoirs and Outline trilogy are the closest match to the living autobiography. Marguerite Duras, an influence Levy has named, wrote The Lover, and Annie Ernaux turned her own life into short, exact books that won her the Nobel Prize. Levy’s newest book is about Gertrude Stein, who is on this list too.

10 authors like Deborah Levy

01
Starting again, on the page

Rachel Cusk

British-Canadian · A Life’s Work (2001), Aftermath (2012), Outline (2014)

Cusk was born in Saskatoon, Canada, in 1967 and grew up partly in Los Angeles before moving to England. Her memoir of early motherhood, A Life’s Work, and her account of divorce, Aftermath, drew hostile reactions for their candour. In Outline and its sequels Transit (2016) and Kudos (2018), a writer called Faye listens while other people tell her about their lives.

The closest match on the shelf. Cusk and Levy are the same generation of British women writers, and both wrote frankly about motherhood and the end of a marriage, then turned that experience into a new kind of book. Cusk is cooler and more withholding; Levy is warmer and more playful.

— Lisanne

Every book by Rachel Cusk →

02
The influence she names

Marguerite Duras

French · The Sea Wall (1950), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), The Lover (1984)

Duras was born in Gia Định, French Indochina, in 1914 and died in Paris in 1996. The Lover, about a French girl’s affair with an older Chinese man in 1920s Indochina, won the Prix Goncourt in 1984; she also wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour. From 1942 to 1944 she worked in a Vichy office that allocated paper to publishers, before joining the Resistance, and her intervention in a 1980s child-murder case, in which she accused the mother, has been dramatised on French television.

The writer who predates Levy’s whole territory, and one she has named as an influence. Duras wrote her own life again and again, each time in a different form and with a different truth, which is what the living autobiography does. Levy is lighter and more ironic; Duras is darker and more incantatory.

— Lisanne

Every book by Marguerite Duras →

03
A life told exactly

Annie Ernaux

French · A Man’s Place (1983), The Years (2008), A Girl’s Story (2016)

Ernaux was born in 1940 and grew up in Yvetot, Normandy, where her parents ran a café-grocery. She has written almost entirely about her own life — her father, her mother, an abortion, a love affair — in short, flat books, and The Years tells it in the third person as the history of a generation. She received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022; her support for the boycott of Israel drew criticism at the time.

Ernaux and Levy both write short books about a woman’s life as it happens and refuse to dress it up as a novel. Ernaux is plainer and more concerned with class; Levy is more interested in what freedom feels like. Both have made memoir into something that reads as literature.

— Lisanne

Every book by Annie Ernaux →

04
The subject of her newest book

Gertrude Stein

American · Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914), The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933)

Stein (1874–1946) lived in Paris from 1903, where her Saturday gatherings at 27 rue de Fleurus drew many leading modernists. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her memoir told in the voice of her partner, became her first bestseller. During the German occupation she and Toklas, both Jewish, were protected by her friend Bernard Faÿ, a Vichy official who collaborated with the Nazis; at his suggestion she translated speeches by Marshal Pétain, which continues to draw criticism.

Levy’s 2026 novel, My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, is about a narrator trying and failing to write an essay on her. Stein’s trick — an autobiography written as if by somebody else — is the ancestor of Levy’s own play with who is telling a life. Read Alice B. Toklas first; it is the easiest way in.

— Lisanne
05
Another memoir in three parts

Tove Ditlevsen

Danish · Childhood (1967), Youth (1967), Dependency (1971)

Ditlevsen was born in Copenhagen in 1917 and died there in 1976. Her three memoirs were published together in English in 2019 as The Copenhagen Trilogy, and The New York Times Book Review named it among the best books of the 21st century in 2024. The third volume describes her addiction to narcotics; she struggled with alcohol and drugs for much of her adult life and was married four times.

The other great three-part memoir of a woman becoming a writer. Ditlevsen’s trilogy follows a working-class girl into poetry, marriage and addiction; Levy’s begins in her fifties, after a marriage. Ditlevsen is bleaker, but both insist that a woman’s freedom has a material cost.

— Lisanne
06
A wife who walks out of her own story

Elena Ferrante

Italian · The Days of Abandonment (2002), My Brilliant Friend (2011)

Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym. The author has published under that name since Troubling Love (1992), gives interviews only in writing and has never confirmed who she is. In The Days of Abandonment a woman whose husband leaves her comes apart over one summer in Turin. Her four Neapolitan novels (2011–2014) follow the friendship of two girls from a poor Naples neighbourhood over some sixty years.

Ferrante writes the same breakage Levy writes — the end of a marriage, a mother and her children, a woman deciding who she is — but as fiction, with her own name withheld entirely. Read The Days of Abandonment beside The Cost of Living to see the same crisis written in rage and in irony.

— Lisanne

Every book by Elena Ferrante →

07
A marriage in fragments

Jenny Offill

American · Dept. of Speculation (2014), Weather (2020)

Offill was born in 1968. Dept. of Speculation tells the story of a marriage, a baby and an affair in short paragraphs, shifting from “I” to “the wife” as the crisis deepens. Weather follows a university librarian increasingly anxious about the climate and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Offill shares Levy’s taste for the short, broken-up book that moves by quotation, joke and sudden feeling rather than by plot. Both write about the tug between motherhood and the writing life, and both are funnier than their subjects suggest.

— Lisanne

Every book by Jenny Offill →

08
Between essay and novel

Olivia Laing

British · The Lonely City (2016), Crudo (2017), The Silver Book (2025)

Laing was born in 1977. The Lonely City mixes her own time alone in New York with the lives of artists, and her novel Crudo won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2019. Her most recent books are The Garden Against Time (2024) and the novel The Silver Book came out in 2025.

Laing, like Levy, moves freely between memoir, criticism and fiction, and writes about artists as a way of writing about herself. She is more of an essayist and less of a comedian, but readers of Real Estate will recognise her questions about how and where to live.

— Lisanne

Every book by Olivia Laing →

09
The question Levy has already answered

Sheila Heti

Canadian · How Should a Person Be? (2010), Motherhood (2018), Pure Colour (2022)

Heti was born in Toronto in 1976. How Should a Person Be? is a novel built from her own life and recorded conversations with friends. Motherhood, an autobiographical novel about whether to have children, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and Pure Colour won the Governor General’s Award for fiction.

A writer who complicates Levy’s subject. Levy writes as a mother looking back at what the role cost and gave; Heti’s narrator is still deciding whether to take it on at all. Both use their own lives as raw material and both ask, out loud, what a woman’s life is for.

— Lisanne
10
The memoir and its truth

Vivian Gornick

American · Fierce Attachments (1987), The Situation and the Story (2001), The Odd Woman and the City (2015)

Gornick was born in New York in 1935 and reported for The Village Voice from 1969 to 1977. Fierce Attachments is a memoir of her mother, told through their walks around Manhattan; The Situation and the Story is a guide to writing personal narrative. In 2003 she said that she had invented some scenes and conversations in her memoir, which drew public criticism.

Gornick sets Levy’s method against a hard question: how true does a memoir have to be? Both write about mothers and daughters and about a woman making a life alone in a city, and both treat the self on the page as something constructed. Gornick’s 2003 admission is worth knowing before you read her.

— Lisanne

Every book by Vivian Gornick →

Where to start if you loved Deborah Levy

If you loved the living autobiography, read Rachel Cusk.

Aftermath (2012), then the Outline trilogy.

If you loved Swimming Home, read Marguerite Duras.

The Lover (1984): a summer, a secret and a girl watching the adults.

If you want the life told plainly, read Annie Ernaux.

The Years (2008): one woman’s life as the history of a generation.

If you want the newest connection, read Gertrude Stein.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), then Levy’s 2026 novel about her.

If you are new to Levy, start with Things I Don’t Want to Know.

Then The Cost of Living (2018) and Real Estate (2021), and Swimming Home (2011) for the fiction.

Frequently asked questions about authors like Deborah Levy

Who writes like Deborah Levy?

Rachel Cusk is the closest, especially Aftermath and the Outline trilogy. Marguerite Duras, whom Levy has named as an influence, and Annie Ernaux are the next places to go.

What should I read after The Cost of Living?

Rachel Cusk’s Aftermath (2012), Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment (2002) and Tove Ditlevsen’s The Copenhagen Trilogy.

Is Deborah Levy like Rachel Cusk?

Both are British women writers of the same generation who wrote frankly about motherhood and the end of a marriage. Cusk is cooler and more withholding; Levy is warmer and more playful.

Does Deborah Levy have a new book?

Yes. My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, a novel about a narrator trying to write an essay on Stein, was published in 2026.

Which Deborah Levy book should I read first?

Start with Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), the first book of her living autobiography, or with Swimming Home (2011) if you prefer fiction.

What is Deborah Levy’s living autobiography?

Three short books: Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018) and Real Estate (2021). They are about writing, motherhood and starting again after the end of a marriage.

Sources

List last reviewed 31 October 2026.

Written by Lisanne Swart, who has curated reading lists and author guides at lisanneswart.com since 2021. Every comparison here is a judgement about method and subject, not an algorithmic match. See more on her personal bookshelf.

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