The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir
Journals and memoirs, Death and bereavement
Synthetic audio, Automated braille
Summary
A gorgeous memoir about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinvention for readers of Cheryl Strayed and Joan Didion When thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012 she… was pregnant married financially secure and successful on her own terms A month later none of that was true Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed Like much of her generation she was raised to resist traditional rules about work about love and about womanhood I wanted what we all want everything We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic surprising We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers We want intimacy and autonomy safety and stimulation reassurance and novelty coziness and thrills But we can t have it all In this profound and beautiful memoir Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses Her own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture of what has changed and of what is eternal Advance praise for The Rules Do Not Apply I read The Rules Do Not Apply in one long rapt sitting Unflinching and intimate wrenching and revelatory Ariel Levy s powerful memoir about love loss and finding one s way shimmers with truth and heart on every page Cheryl Strayed Every deep feeling a human is capable of will be shaken loose by this profound book Ariel Levy has taken grief and made art out of it David Sedaris Ariel Levy is a writer of uncompromising honesty remarkable clarity and surprising humor gathered from the wreckage of tragedy Her account of life doing its darnedest to topple her and her refusal to be knocked down will leave you shaken and inspired I am the better for having read this book Lena Dunham A great memoir is not a trip through someone else s life but a series of long looks into your own Ariel Levy s book grieving hopeful painful funny is that Amy Bloom It s become a truism that feminists are living out our mothers unlived lives But Ariel Levy seems to be living out the unlived lives of an entire generation of women simultaneously Free to do whatever she chooses she chooses everything While reinventing work marriage family pregnancy sex and divorce for herself from the ground up Levy experiences devastating loss And she recounts it all here with searing intimacy and an unsentimental yet openhearted rigor Alison Bechdel The Rules Do Not Apply is heartbreaking brilliant and disarming the kind of book that may change you Ariel Levy writes with a beauty that is ferociously honest and with the fervor of an explorer No one else has written so insightfully about the current legacy of feminism s lavish gift of freedom Levy has a voice unlike any other This is a devastating and inspired book Ren Steinke