High among the “guardian angels” (the author’s term, not mine) we meet in this unusual memoir stands Celia, the octogenarian neighbour who gave Deborah Levy her garden shed to write in when she was struggling to build a new life for herself and her two young daughters after the breakdown of her marriage. It was here that Levy, an accomplished Booker-­nominated novelist, first began to write in the first person, “using an I that is close to myself and yet is not myself”.