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

Elias Seidenberg

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

Marián Blaha

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

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

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

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. 

The Cost of Living quotes

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