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‘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.’
Ariel Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she lived believing that conventional rules no longer applied – that marriage doesn’t have to mean monogamy, that aging doesn’t have to mean infertility, that she could be ‘the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses’. But all of her assumptions about what she can control are undone after a string of overwhelming losses.
‘I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.’
Levy’s own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed – and what never can.
Ariel Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she lived believing that conventional rules no longer applied – that marriage doesn’t have to mean monogamy, that aging doesn’t have to mean infertility, that she could be ‘the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses’. But all of her assumptions about what she can control are undone after a string of overwhelming losses.
‘I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.’
Levy’s own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed – and what never can.
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Reviews
Levy is a fearless, original journalist, now on the New Yorker, and she uses these same qualities to scrutinise her own life . . . Levy's prose is dynamic, molten with verbs and with images of light, movement and change . . . breathtakingly good . . .
A talented journalist - a staff writer at the New Yorker - she knows how to tell a story and keep it brief . . . gripping
This is more than simply a tale of a life undone . . . Levy's articulation of grief is also beautifully, frighteningly real
A great memoir is not a trip through someone else's life, but a series of long looks into your own life. Ariel Levy's book - grieving, hopeful, painful, funny - is that
Her narrative rattles along at the breakneck pace of a gripping thriller, yet her writing is never anything
short of crystal clear. She's particularly good at describing love and loss . . . a brilliant memoirist
The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy is simultaneously the personal story of a dramatic miscarriage, a frank, powerful look at shifting gender roles and how we make a life for ourselves, and an inside glimpse into Levy's work as a journalist for the New Yorker
Brutally honest yet ultimately uplifting
A memoir that will change the way you think about monogamy and motherhood . . . we defy you not to read it in a single sitting
Every deep feeling a human is capable of will be shaken loose by this short, but profound book. Ariel Levy has taken grief, and made art out of it
A searing and poignantly honest memoir . . . Her story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture
By chapter three of The Rules Do Not Apply I was ordering copies for every woman I love . . . Levy's honesty and grief are dazzling
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
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. Her ersatz brand of zen wisdom is one we all need in our lives. I am the better for having read this book
A great memoir is not just a trip through someone else's life, but a series of long looks into your own life. Ariel Levy's book - grieving, hopeful, painful, funny - is that
Levy is a fantastic writer and reporter, cool-headed, witty and without self-pity
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. But this is no mindless primer on having or not having it all. 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
Think heightened senses and heady in-the-moment intensity. She's crisscrossed the globe in search of these
unique experiences as a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2008, and now turns her interrogative eye on herself. What results is
profound, and lasting
In this heartwrenching memoir, the journalist reveals how her desire to have it all - the partner, the lover, the adventurous career and the happy family - was painfully blown apart
A dazzling insight into the mind of one of the New Yorker's most prolific writers, Ariel Levy's memoir will seem relatable to all those who have at one time or another felt a startling sense of dissociation from their life
A gut punch of a book as she explores the dilemmas of professional women who work hard then find they want children