A New York Times Notable Book
A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018
What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?
This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson.
The Cost of Living, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed novels.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
July 10, 2018 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781635571929
- File size: 12345 KB
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781635571929
- File size: 1065 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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Publisher's Weekly
Starred review from February 26, 2018
This slim, singular memoir by British playwright and poet Levy (Hot Milk) chronicles a brief period following the “shipwreck” of the London writer’s 20-year marriage. Levy, a Booker Prize finalist, moved from a large Victorian home to an apartment with her two young adult daughters, accepted an offer from an octogenarian friend of a small shed in which to write, and began to rebuild her life. In the process, she explores the role she has played in the past: that of the nurturing “architect” of family life. Now she hopes to reinvent herself as an independent woman who not only provides for her children, but who enjoys a new physical (e.g., she whizzes about on an electric bike) and creative energy in “the most professionally busy time” in her life. She is occasionally drawn back to her former life; memories make her long for the past (a sprig of rosemary, for example, makes her think of a garden she once planted in the family house), but don’t prevent her from moving forward. Levy describes writing as “looking, listening, and paying attention,” and she accomplishes these with apparent ease. Her descriptions of the people she meets, the conversations she overhears, and the nuances she perceives in relationships are keen and moving (about a man she has just met, “I objected to my male walking companion never remembering the names of women”). This timely look at how women are viewed (and often dismissed) by society will resonate with many readers, but particularly with those who have felt marginalized or undervalued. -
Kirkus
May 1, 2018
After divorce and her mother's death, a writer struggles to redefine herself.In a memoir notable for its graceful prose, two-time Booker Prize finalist, playwright, and poet Levy (Hot Milk, 2016, etc.) reflects on the new reality of her life after two nearly simultaneous events: the end of her marriage and the loss of her mother. Moving with her daughters into a "large shabby apartment," she was determined to create "an entirely new composition" for all of their lives. "There are only loving and unloving homes," she writes. "It is the patriarchal story that has been broken." The author has much to say about ways that the patriarchal story erases women's identity. For example, she met several men who refer to women only as men's girlfriends or wives. At a party, one man never asked her one question about herself, all the while talking about his own books and his ailing wife. "It seemed," Levy writes, "that what he needed was a devoted, enchanting woman at his side...who understood that he was entirely the subject." That experience was hardly unusual: "It is so mysterious to want to suppress women," she muses. "It is so hard to claim our desires and so much more relaxing to mock them," she adds. Levy wonders about how desire shaped her mother's life and how much her own desires shaped her perception of her mother: "If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us." Mothers receive "mixed messages, written in society's most poisoned ink." That poisoned ink infects any woman who dares to break from societal prescriptions. Rebellious women are expected "to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse." But the author's unexpected freedom from her role as wife liberated something "that had been trapped and stifled," generating renewed energy. Still, she admits, "freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs."An elegant, candid meditation on the fraught journey to self-knowledge.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Formats
- Kindle Book
- OverDrive Read
- EPUB ebook
Languages
- English
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