Deborah Levy

From the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home : Dazzling, essential, entirely unlike anything else -- a memoir on modern womanhood, rejecting oppressive social expectations and turning instead towards a thrilling, transformative freedom What does it mean to be free - as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom? In this dazzling memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom. Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk - when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end - she is characteristically eloquent on the social expectations and surreal realities of daily life. And expanding far beyond these bounds, she describes a uniquely frank, wise and thrilling manifesto for female experience: embracing the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel.

The Cost of Living

the beginning spectres of her novel, Hot Milk

aileen

It begins with knowing and not knowing, a glass of milk, rain, a reproach, a door slammed shut, a mother’s sharp tongue, a snail, a wish, bitten fingernails, an open window. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is unbearable. 

Marián Blaha

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

I might one day risk falling in love again, but I was not going to lose my heart to the cardiologist. 

 but now I had become a morning and a night person. I'm not sure what happened to sleep in this phase. 

A searching examination of all the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy. To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children has been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman. The Cost of Living explores the subtle erasure of women's names, spaces, and stories in the modern everyday. In this “living autobiography” infused with warmth and humor, Deborah Levy critiques the roles that society assigns to us, and reflects on the politics of breaking with the usual gendered rituals. 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? Levy draws on her own experience of attempting to live with pleasure, value, and meaning--the making of a new kind of family home, the challenges of her mother's death--and those of women she meets in everyday life, from a young female traveler reading in a bar who suppresses her own words while she deflects an older man's advances, to a particularly brilliant student, to a kindly and ruthless octogenarian bookseller who offers the author a place to write at a difficult time in her life. The Cost of Living is urgent, essential reading, a crystalline manifesto for turbulent times.

A Working Autobiography

Elias Seidenberg

„Yes“, I replied, „but love is like war; it always finds a way.“

Dora Tominic

Disclaimer: this is not a review.

I'm so sleepy but this was a cookie.

takes a break from meticulous, disgruntled recollection of daily minutiae (often bordering on a surprisingly comic, seinfeld-esque breakdown of petty grudges) to make the dissociation of memory literal in a dream sequence. a perfect marriage of recreation and truth. because the truth is always what is felt, and what you convince yourself of.

right now i'm convinced a long enough conversation with anyone will reveal that we are the same; i wonder what it feels like on the other side of life when your thirties have transpired. when expected conversations dry up and cease. i wonder how grief would smell on me, who has everything to lose. levy speaks of loss in terms that defy categorisation and linear time. i spent so long reading parts one and two that they have become one intractable web in my mind. i feel the weight of the full scope of her life like bergman's scenes from a marriage. work, play, leisure, bereavement, et al.

pranya

takes a break from meticulous, disgruntled recollection of daily minutiae (often bordering on a surprisingly comic, seinfeld-esque breakdown of petty grudges) to make the dissociation of memory literal in a dream sequence. a perfect marriage of recreation and truth. because the truth is always what is felt, and what you convince yourself of.

right now i'm convinced a long enough conversation with anyone will reveal that we are the same; i wonder what it feels like on the other side of life when your thirties have transpired. when expected conversations dry up and cease. i wonder how grief would smell on me, who has everything to lose. levy speaks of loss in terms that defy categorisation and linear time. i spent so long reading parts one and two that they have become one intractable web in my mind. i feel the weight of the full scope of her life like bergman's scenes from a marriage. work, play, leisure, bereavement, et al.

Deborah Levy and her writings on womanhood will never fail to wrench my heart (yet it comforts me, so much)

zahra

Life falls apart. We try to get a grip. We try to hold it together. And then we realize that we don't want to hold it together . . . ' Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement, and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.

Cost of Living The

hileahrious

I give this book 4 stars because in the realm of autobiography (not that I’ve read so many) I am going to assume it is unique, and I just really liked it. I think if each one of us put ourselves to writing a working autobiography, it would be something like this, the difference being of course that Levy writes exquisitely. Stream-of-consciousness-like sentences; thoughts that come from somewhere but nowhere, but somewhere; images and concepts that seemingly have no purpose but really say so much more than what might actually be spoken... it’s interesting because so much is said, however so little is said. Reminds me a bit of David Sedaris’s writing... a type of writing that, although it describes the life and experiences of someone else, makes you end up thinking quite deeply about your own personal experiences.

An honest exploration of identity. Epecially enjoyed all the north London references 🤗 

Molly Bridge

Jeannette Ordas

Really enjoyed this memoir about the emotional cost of being a woman, a wife, a mother. It's about grief and about the transitional spaces between marriage and home and work. The writing is beautiful and concise - it's a quick read.

Angbeen Abbas

deborah levy if ure reading this please get a coffee with me in north london i wish u were my mum soooooo bad

The Cost of Living

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