A searingly honest look at what can be lost when a relationship ends in divorce
When she was around 50 and her life was supposed to be “slowing down, becoming more stable and predictable”, writer Deborah Levy left her marriage.
She was adrift, her marriage was a boat, and if she tried to swim back she would drown.
Separating from her husband was, she says, the best thing she ever did, but the fallout was devastating.
In The Cost of Living, she reflects on her experiences after she left, the practicalities of having to construct a new life and what that new life might mean. Like her previous memoir, Things I Don’t Want to Know, the book is concerned with gender politics and explores womanhood and friendship.
Twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Levy (above) uses her novelist’s eye to create succinct, memorable scenes that illustrate and circle back on her themes. On the Eurostar, an older man asks a teenage girl to move her computer. The girl puts it on her lap. “This was a small rearrangement of space,” Levy writes, but the outcome was that the girl had entirely removed herself from the table to make room for his newspaper and lunch. Again and again, she returns to this subject: women not being allowed — or not allowing themselves — to take up physical and conversational space.
Reflective rather than didactic, she questions imbalances, the double standards, the “complicated and confusing” politics of the modern home.
She includes several examples of men she knows who obscure and undermine women.
A male colleague forgets women’s names. Her best male friend refers to his “wife,” rather than using his wife’s name. Another man refuses to look at his wife “clearly telling her that she did not exist for him”.
In certain ways — its emotional truth, its psychological and philosophical depth, its beautifully nuanced prose — the book resembles Aftermath, Rachel Cusk’s divorce memoir, and Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill, a fragmentary novel about marriage and parenthood.
The book’s fragmentary form suits its subject. She is documenting the impact of dismantling a home and this has the effect of flipping time into a “weird shape.” Though she’s honest, she’s also fair — it’s not a book about her husband and we only get hints of why her marriage might have broken down.