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How Deborah Levy Can Change Your Life by Charlotte Higgins.

Last August, the author Deborah Levy began to sit for her portrait.

The starting point was a selfie, eyes penetrating, lips sensuous, head-topped by a tower of chestnut

hair. The artist, her friend Paul Heber Percy, used Photoshop, then a pencil and tracing paper,

to reverse and multiply the image of her face until he had a drawing neatly laid out on a grid

that satisfied him. Then it was time to paint. He liked to work in the mornings in our long

bursts in his tiny attic studio. When Levy came for sittings, he'd bring the painting down to

the dining room and the two of them would drink tea or wine and talk. Not that these were

sittings in the traditional sense, but times I could observe her without feeling self-conscious,

he said. Sometimes they discussed Levy's new novel, August Blue, which she was finishing.

But mostly, it was everyday things, friends, the news, exchanging recipes, how to unblock a sink,

said Levy. But Heber Percy told me nothing about these conversations was really every day.

She's the sort of person who makes the mundane remarkable. Even going down to the bakery with

her to get a baguette becomes a slightly magical thing, her friend the novelist Tash or told me.

When her friends talk about her, they say things like this. She is an event, she is a personage,

she is a whole world. People often remember the first time they met her. For Kate Bland,

an audio producer, it was at a party at a shortage warehouse. Levy was sitting on a high windowsill,

Bland was leaning on it. The author's rich, slightly breathy voice was coming over Bland's shoulder.

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