Maternal instinct crushed by reality
Ariel Levy, on tour for her new memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” sizes up the young journalist sitting across the table from her. She notices slight nervous tics — stuttering on a question, fiddling with a napkin, furiously scribbling down everything Levy says.
“Don’t worry,” she says reassuringly. “It gets easier; you’ll see.”
The conversation transitions back to the subject at hand as she adds: “Sorry, I don’t mean to be overly maternal. But I can’t help it, because all my maternal energy that doesn’t get to go into having children — I’m unable not to direct at young journalists. I find it impossible. I can’t help it.”
The origin of this maternal instinct is at the crushing climax of “The Rules Do Not Apply” and can also be traced back to her award-winning 2013 New Yorker essay, “Thanksgiving in Mongolia.” In both, she details an affecting personal tragedy: While on assignment in a foreign country, she had a miscarriage 19 weeks into her pregnancy.
The book expands on that time of her life, further detailing her miscarriage and its
place in a sequence of events that irrevocably changed her life.
“I mean, I lost my child, my spouse and my house in a six-week period,” Levy says, laughing dryly as she explains the premise of the memoir.
“The Rules Do Not Apply” tells of her relationship with her former wife and the dissolution of their marriage. Levy details an affair, an alcohol problem and her and her wife’s doubts about their relationship.
“I think most people don’t realize the damage they’re doing till they do it, you know?” she says. “And then, I thought having things the way I wanted them was just a matter of being sufficiently strategic and tenacious about things. I learned in no uncertain terms that that’s not true.
“Anything can be taken away from you at any time, because you can’t insulate yourself from loss,” she adds. “Loss is the price that people pay to keep being alive.”
Down to its title, “The Rules Do Not Apply” is all about realizing that the myth of “having it all” can lead to selfdestructive behavior. Levy posits that women, in particular, are societally primed to believe that “having it all” itself looks and feels a certain way (dream job, good marriage, great family, etc.), but these oversimplified building blocks are never so simple. Life is messier than that.
“When I was younger, I think my thought was that I wanted to have as many experiences as I could — I didn’t want to miss anything, you know?” she says. “But having everything, I believe, is impossible. The human condition is not having everything we want.”
Public response to Levy’s story has continued to affirm her theory. Through written words alone, she’s found a sense of solidarity with women across the country who have gone through similar pregnancy traumas. Women have written to her, spoken to her at events, thanked her for her candor about something that is much more common than people would like to think.
“I’ve had a pretty intense response from women who have lost babies or children or had stillbirths — just intense stuff that made me think, ‘Oh, women want to communicate about this,’ ” Levy said. “There isn’t enough said or written about this.”
A simplified explanation for people’s viscerally strong reaction to Levy’s story is that pregnancy can be a difficult and fickle thing, and Levy shed light on this reality. But the real heart of the matter is potentially more difficult to explain. The ability to create life is powerful, but also fragile and fleeting — it’s an ability granted by Mother Nature that women intimately understand, a feeling to which only they can speak.
Levy recognizes this. Above all else, even beyond the desire to talk about a low point in her life, she wanted to contribute to a conversation about “having it all,” and the real-world experiences women go through that undermine that impossible idea.
“If I’d heard this story, and it wasn’t my story, I’d want to write about it,” Levy says. “There’s all these important issues involved that I like to write about and have been writing about for 20 years. So I thought, ‘Well, I have one hell of a story. I’m going to do it.’ ”