After tragedy, the painful self-inventory
Ariel Levy’s meditation on grief
Of all the things we worry about in the small hours of the night, death usually reigns supreme: who it will come for, when, how, all of the unknowns death contains. In this way, we touch the edges of grief from a safe distance, knowing we can pull ourselves back. In her new memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” Ariel Levy comes face to face with grief after a chain of events leaves her without her newborn son, spouse and home. “Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable,” she writes with heartbreaking candor, and this realization shocks her into understanding how fragile the lives we create for ourselves really are.
This book doesn’t pretend to be anything but a meditation on grief, in the tradition of Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” and Cheryl Strayed. In the preface, the author writes, “It has been made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all.” Difficult to learn, but impossible to forget, this lesson casts a long shadow over the rest of the memoir. As the author begins by tracing the start of her writing career and marriage, the reader’s knowledge of the impending tragedies makes her recollections bittersweet. A remarkable thing about Ms. Levy’s work is how she looks back at her actions with unflinching honesty about her regrets; her memories are forever clouded with her knowledge of the painfully random nature of life, and she never wastes an opportunity to chastise herself. In the second chapter, for example, she recounts a trip to South Africa to write an article for The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. The relatively successful adventure ends with the author taking a safari to enjoy the wildlife, but this story is colored by the grief that saturates the entire book: “I made the mistake that would lead to my first real regret. Up until then, my regrets had been feathery things, the regrets of a privileged child. … But on that morning, I made the first of many real mistakes that would stack up on top of one another until they blocked out the sun.”
However, Ms. Levy’s tendency for self-flagellation seems at odds with her understanding of the dispassionate whirl of the universe, giving “The Rules Do Not Apply” a feeling of urgency — that the author is, while writing, still moving through the stages of grief. This doesn’t necessarily detract from the book, as it shows that grief is a process, where we are both blaming ourselves, yet learning not to, as we move forward.
Still, her need to explain the mistakes she feels she has made — her affair with an ex-lover, in particular, is subjected to a lot of what can be boiled down to “what was I thinking?” — stands in contrast to the overall thesis: “Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.” Whether this conflict is intentional is unclear.
“The Rules Do Not Apply” is not an easy read, and for people who are perhaps still laboring under the illusion that they have control over their lives, its downbeat tone might be a bit much to bear. For anyone who has ever grieved, though, not only does the book serve as a testament to the obliterating nature of loss, but it also offers hope: “Death comes for us. You may get 10 minutes on this earth or you may get eighty years but nobody gets out alive. Accepting this rule gives me a funny flicker of peace.” Ms. Levy’s insight shows that even in the darkest of nights, there may still be a light, however small, that can lead you onward.