Andrea Lewenstein's literary life began in the pages of Spare Rib in 1979 and ended, in a sense, with a completed novel manuscript just months before her death. That arc — over four decades, most of them lived with ME — is the central fact of her work. The illness wasn't background; it was the country she learned to inhabit, as she put it in her blog, like emigrating to a place with its own customs and geography. She was born in London to two actors, Renee Goddard and Michael Mellinger, who had each fled Nazi Germany as child refugees. That history of displacement — literal, geographic, linguistic — surfaces in her later novel Key of the Kingdom, which drew on her childhood experiences. She grew up in Primrose Hill, spent two years as a young child in Berlin where she learned German, attended ten different schools, was expelled at least twice, and eventually came to English literature at Goldsmiths as a mature student, graduating in 1987. The résumé of someone for whom formal structures never quite fit. Her published short fiction appeared in the 1991 anthology Sleeping Rough under the pen name Andie Hawthorn — a slight disguise, perhaps, or a writer still finding the name she wanted on her work. That same year the family moved to Forest Row, East Sussex, and the forest became a persistent imaginative territory for her, alongside the fairytale tradition. She spent years teaching creative writing to adults and co-hosting Poetry Otherwise, the annual residential event at Emerson College, winning prizes, placing poems in journals and magazines, and reading her work widely. Her blog, Reading the Signs, ran for years as a double-helix: the creative process wound together with the experience of chronic illness. It is a rarer form than it looks. Most writers who write about illness treat it as subject matter. Lewenstein treated it as a condition of production — the page as the place where you think about what it means to make things when making things costs you more than it costs most people. The 2020 poetry collection House of Bread came out during the pandemic, a small act of publication in a strange year. She and Mark moved to Brighton in 2015, then Hove — she loved the sea, her son notes, almost as much as she loved the forest — and eventually to Enfield to be near family. Key of the Kingdom, the novel she finished a few months before her death, draws on her childhood. Whether it will be published is not yet known, but its completion is itself a fact worth marking: a woman with a debilitating chronic illness finishing a novel in her early seventies, on her own terms, on her own timeline. The phrase her son uses — "what she achieved despite ME is extraordinary" — is generous but slightly misses the point she herself made. The blog didn't frame the illness as an obstacle heroically overcome. It framed it as a territory with its own rules, which she learned. That's a more honest account, and probably a more useful one for the many readers who found it.
