We can’t have it all

BOOK REVIEW And what “we” have you been included in?

This feeling is something of a trademark for Levy. Her first book, Female Chauvinist Pigs, on the trade-offs between empowerment and sexualization, leaves a similar sting in one’s mouth. In this memoir, too, one feels that the subtlety of Levy’s politics doesn’t achieve the subtlety of her prose, tending instead toward the polemical. Writing for New York and then the New Yorker, she follows women nudging the boundaries of womanhood: fullbodied clubgoers, roving bands of lesbian separatists, intersex athletes. Yet here she doubts that women of her generation, “given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism,” were left better off by the option. Levy may be the most retrogressive progressive writer we have.

And what a writer she is. Her memoir is all tough immediacy, every detail sharp as India ink, from the “leggy nasturtiums” in a yard to her first look at Lucy, the woman who will become her wife. But she cheats on Lucy with an ex-girlfriend — now an exboyfriend — and, dizzyingly, plans to carry his eggs. Levy gets pregnant with the help of a sperm donor. And then, as New Yorker readers know, she accepts an assignment in Mongolia.

“What did I believe?” Levy asks us. “That I could be gay and straight? That I could be married and unhindered? A wanderer and a mother?” There is an answer here that is affecting and true in its particulars (the story of a reporter dismantled by wanting and grief) and an answer that is false as a generalization (that women cannot have both a career and a family). The real answer lies somewhere in the rich middle ground that is ordinarily Levy’s province. One finishes the book thinking of Levy’s awe when she met Caster Semenya. “She didn’t look like a teenage girl, or a teenage boy,” Levy writes. “She looked like something else, something magnificent.”