The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy Little, Brown 224pp £16.99

The Week Bookshop £14.99

This “stark”, “succinct” and “blistering” memoir tells the story of a life suddenly gone wrong, said Emily Witt in The Guardian. In her mid-30s, Ariel Levy (pictured) appeared to have successfully balanced “domesticity with the pursuit of intellectual and sexual adventure”. A writer at The New Yorker who “travelled the world”, Levy was also a “homeowner with an organised linen closet”. And she was married to a woman. She had, as she puts it, “managed to solve the Jane Austen problems that women have been confronting for centuries… in an entirely unconventional way”. Then, over the course of a few months, everything “fell apart”. Levy became pregnant via artificial insemination with a male friend; 19 weeks into her pregnancy, on assignment in Mongolia, she miscarried the baby in her hotel room. “Her son was born alive, but did not survive; Levy held him in her hand as he died.” Shortly afterwards her marriage collapsed, under the strain not only of the miscarriage, but also her partner’s alcoholism and Levy’s infidelity with an ex-partner. Levy’s account of these events is “brutal in its self-recrimination”: she sees her misfortunes as “punishment for having lived a decadent life”.

It is tempting to read this book as a lesson for modern women, suggesting that they “cannot have everything”, said Katie Glass in The Sunday Times. Levy suggests that many women today are in “denial of their biology”, optimistically believing – as she herself did – that they can “delay motherhood”. Yet for the most part, she “skims these issues” and focuses on her own experience. “I am glad she does”, because her “honesty and grief are dazzling”: this is a book that’s impossible to put down. By chapter three, I was “ordering copies for every woman I love”.