The Rules Do Not Apply: Ariel Levy - Softcover

Every deep feeling a human is capable of will be shaken loose by this short, but profound book. Ariel Levy has taken grief, and made art out of it (David Sedaris)

Levy is a fantastic writer and reporter, cool-headed, witty and without self-pity (Rachel Cooke Observer)

By chapter three of The Rules Do Not Apply I was ordering copies for every woman I love . . . Levy's honesty and grief are dazzling (Sunday Times)

Levy is a fearless, original journalist, now on the New Yorker, and she uses these same qualities to scrutinise her own life . . . Levy's prose is dynamic, molten with verbs and with images of light, movement and change . . . breathtakingly good . . . (Nicci Gerrard Observer)

Her narrative rattles along at the breakneck pace of a gripping thriller, yet her writing is never anything
short of crystal clear. She's particularly good at describing love and loss . . . a brilliant memoirist

(Independent)

Brutally honest yet ultimately uplifting (Vogue)

In this heartwrenching memoir, the journalist reveals how her desire to have it all - the partner, the lover, the adventurous career and the happy family - was painfully blown apart (Stylist)

A memoir that will change the way you think about monogamy and motherhood . . . we defy you not to read it in a single sitting (Elle)

It's become a truism that feminists are living out our mothers' unlived lives. But Ariel Levy seems to be living out the unlived lives of an entire generation of women, simultaneously. Free to do whatever she chooses, she chooses everything. But this is no mindless primer on having or not having it all. While reinventing work, marriage, family, pregnancy, sex, and divorce for herself from the ground up, Levy experiences devastating loss. And she recounts it all here with searing intimacy and an unsentimental yet openhearted rigor (Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home)

I read The Rules Do Not Apply in one long, rapt sitting. Unflinching and intimate, wrenching and revelatory, Ariel Levy's powerful memoir about love, loss, and finding one's way shimmers with truth and heart on every page (Cheryl Strayed)

'I wanted what we all want: everything. 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, coziness and thrills. But we can't have it all.' Ariel Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she lived believing that conventional rules no longer applied - that marriage doesn't have to mean monogamy, that aging doesn't have to mean infertility, that she could be 'the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses'. But all of her assumptions about what she can control are undone after a string of overwhelming losses. 'I thought I had harnessed the power of my own strength and greed and love in a life that could contain it. But it has exploded.' Levy's own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed - and what never can.