Things fall apart
Ariel Levy’s 2013 nationalaward-winning essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” is the foundation for her new memoir, “The Rules Do Not Apply,” and it remains the best essay I’ve ever read. The essay’s keen, keening investigation of the stillbirth of her son, whose heart didn’t stop until Levy herself removed their shared placenta from her body in a hotel room in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, is marvelously, rigorously rendered tragedy.
The memoir built around that essay never reaches the same heights as the original manifestation. It takes us swiftly through Levy’s childhood, teen years and the decades she relished as a journalist in New York City, then into her life after the stillbirth shook the cords that anchored her sense of self.
About a third of the way into her memoir, Levy is living her own version of “having it all.” Her talent, impatience and ambition are rewarded, and she becomes a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her romantic impetuousness is rewarded, too, and the woman she loves, Lucy, leaves her partner and her West Coast home to marry Levy. Levy says, “I had managed to solve the Jane Austen problems that women have been confronting for centuries — securing a provider for your children, finding a mate to pass the time with, and creating a convivial home — in an entirely unconventional way.” But infidelity, insecurities and addiction slip into Lucy and Ariel’s home on Shelter Island. Add in Levy’s increasingly undeniable desire for a child, and a storm begins to brew.
In her introduction to “The Best American Essays 2015,” Levy writes, “An essay must have an idea as its beating heart.” The question driving “The Rules Do Not Apply” is if the author has expected too much out of life, was too entitled and therefore brought down the slings and arrows of fortune upon her own head. She asks, “What did I believe? That I could be gay and straight? That I could be married and unhindered? A wanderer and a mother?”
The heart of a memoir is not usually an idea, but a story. We’re drawn to memoirs because they reassure us with a sense of destiny. Memoirists give shape and purpose to the vicissitudes they encounter. It might take the shape of confession (St. Augustine), or self-help (Elizabeth Gilbert), but memoir is essentially a map from the past to the present.
This is an essayist’s memoir, not a novelist’s. Levy presents scenes from her life like a series of loosely related studies of a feminist version of Macbeth’s o’erweening ambition. The book’s approach can be frustrating. Explanations and through lines are replaced by considerations of subjects as they crop up in her life: womanhood, the struggle between autonomy and companionship, and life continuing after a hail of heartbreaks.
Like any memoirist, Levy is still drawn to making sense through hindsight. But when the platitude “Everything happens for a reason” is tossed at her as a salve, the realization strikes her that as a storyteller, she unthinkingly has believed both in reasons and in destinations. Only with that faith can we think we are in control, captains of our own ships. Levy susses out instead that life owes her nothing. We are as mortal as Icarus, and our desires must run up against limits.
As a journalist, Levy has mastered critical distance, that element that eludes too many memoirists who seem to set out thinking, Finally I get to tell my side of the story! When Levy applies her practiced, detached observation to her life, she turns it in her hands like a jeweler examining a gem. About her affair, she is unflinchingly direct: “Every time, it was transcendent. But then I started not wanting to leave after I put my clothes on. And then I was destroyed.” The most agonizingly beautiful language of the book is reserved for Levy’s too-early birth, when her eye for detail is at its most hawk-like. Back in New York, bereft of her unborn son, she writes, “I saw him under my closed eyelids like an imprint from the sun.”
However, this objectivity escapes her time and again when regarding her marriage. Her deep disappointment drags us too close to a still sore wound. Her spouse is drinking herself into a stupor, and Levy asks, “But what about me ?Mememe me me?” Levy is not an author who thinks women have to be likable in order to be the hero of their own story.
Levy seems to mourn most the loss of her vision of her future. In offering the backstory of a marriage gone sour and the tumultuous aftermath of coming home unpregnant, the encapsulated shriek of Levy’s original essay becomes muted and dispersed. She is now a woman whose plans have become sand spilling through her fingers, still learning that loss is neither something you deserve nor can escape.