The Rules Do Not Apply

Adecade or so ago, the misery memoir was the thing but that has passed. We are now in the era of literary meditations on grief – about the awful things that happen to people, rather than the awful things people do to each other.

I date the beginning of the modern grief genre to Joan Didion’s The Year Of Magical Thinking, in which she described in unflinching prose the deaths of her husband and daughter, and it is Didion’s book that comes most to mind reading this dark memoir by Ariel Levy.

Early on, Levy, a gay writer living in New York, confides: ‘I cannot locate my competent self – one more missing person. I have lost my son, my spouse, and my house.’ She goes on to describe, in unsparing, forensic detail how the wheels came off in such spectacular fashion.

Levy seemed to have a charmed life. A prominent feminist and acclaimed writer, she secured a gig at The New Yorker. She had a beautiful house, a beautiful wife, and she was pregnant, aged 38, via a perfect male donor. She lost it all.

I don’t want to spoil the ‘story’ but it’s a short and shocking book, which I read in one sitting.

Levy unpacks the myth that educated, clever, attractive people like her can somehow cherry-pick their way through life, reinventing the rules of work, marriage, sex, motherhood.

‘We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, cosiness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.’

Instead, what Levy gets is alcoholism, addiction, adultery (she rekindles an affair with an old girlfriend who has become a male, which is, she accepts, a bit weird) and death. But however many times Levy gets knocked down, she always gets up again. Life gives her lemons and she makes literary lemonade.

Recommended – but not for the fainthearted.