The Cost of Living A Working Autobiography
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.
Reviews
Dora Tominic@dorkele
pranya@prancetta
zahra@zoeahra
hileahrious@hileahrious
Molly Bridge@mollyb
Jeannette Ordas@kickpleat
Angbeen Abbas@angbeen
Alishba Ali@shezal
marketa@market333
khaoula@snrio0
Totoread@shijin_krishnan
Leo Renee@leonierenees
Amalie@amalien
Mariam Abdel-Razek@mariamabdelrazek
Marián Blaha@blahamari
Elias Seidenberg@eliasseidenberg
MK@easyfriday
Adriana Coppola@adrianaa
Maisie MacDonald@cottagereading
Sara Holman@saralovesbooks
Gabe Cortez@gabegortez
Stephen Schenkenberg@schenkenberg
Fien Visser@fvisser
Pola Schwöbel@fraupola
Highlights
aileen@aintimating
Marián Blaha@blahamari
Page 108
Marián Blaha@blahamari
Page 34
Marián Blaha@blahamari
Page 25
Elias Seidenberg@eliasseidenberg
Elias Seidenberg@eliasseidenberg