The Rules Do Not Apply | Levy, Ariel

Kurze Beschreibung
In gorgeous, moving, sharp, unforgettable prose, Levy describes her own ill-fated assumptions: thinking that anything is possible, that the old rules do not apply, that marriage doesn't have to mean monogamy, that aging doesn't have to mean infertility. In telling her own story, Levy captures a portrait of our time, of the shifting forces in American culture, and of how to begin again.

Lange Beschreibung
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER   This Year s Must-Read Memoir (W magazine) about the choices a young woman makes in her search for adventure, meaning, and love

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Vogue Time Esquire Entertainment Weekly The Guardian Harper s Bazaar Library Journal NPR 

All her life, Ariel Levy was told that she was too fervent, too forceful, too much. As a young woman, she decided that becoming a writer would perfectly channel her strength and desire. She would be a professional explorer the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses. Levy moved to Manhattan to pursue her dream, and spent years of adventure, traveling all over the world writing stories about unconventional heroines, following their fearless examples in her own life.

But when she experiences unthinkable heartbreak, Levy is forced to surrender her illusion of control. In telling her story, Levy has captured a portrait of our time, of the shifting forces in American culture, of what has changed and what has remained. And of how to begin again.

Praise for The Rules Do Not Apply

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

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

Beautifully crafted . . . This book is haunting; it is smart and engaging. It was so engrossing that I read it in a day. The New York Times Book Review

Levy s wise and poignant memoir is the voice of a new generation of women, full of grit, pathos, truth, and inspiration. Being in her presence is energizing and ennobling. Reading her deep little book is inspiring. San Francisco Book Review

Levy has the rare gift of seeing herself with fierce, unforgiving clarity. And she deploys prose to match, raw and agile. She plumbs the commotion deep within and takes the measure of her have-it-all generation. The Atlantic

Cheryl Strayed meets a Nora Ephron movie. You ll laugh, ugly cry, and finish it before the weekend s over. theSkimm

Rezensierung
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 

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

Beautifully crafted . . . This book is haunting; it is smart and engaging. It was so engrossing that I read it in a day. The New York Times Book Review

Levy s wise and poignant memoir is the voice of a new generation of women, full of grit, pathos, truth, and inspiration. Being in her presence is energizing and ennobling. Reading her deep little book is inspiring. San Francisco Book Review

Levy has the rare gift of seeing herself with fierce, unforgiving clarity. And she deploys prose to match, raw and agile. She plumbs the commotion deep within and takes the measure of her have-it-all generation. The Atlantic

Cheryl Strayed meets a Nora Ephron movie. You ll laugh, ugly cry, and finish it before the weekend s over. theSkimm

This year s must-read memoir. W

Levy s tone is deeply honest, and at the same time manages to not be defensive or apologetic about her decisions; she s not judgmental, but remains highly inquisitive. The through line is her struggle to see things as accurately as possible, to translate her gift for interview and narrative into something personally productive. . . . I loved Levy s book. Jezebel

[The Rules Do Not Apply] is a short, sharp American memoir in the Mary Karr tradition of life-chronicling. . . . Levy, like Karr, is a natural writer who is also as unsparing and bleakly hilarious as it s possible to be about oneself. . . . I devoured her story in one sitting. Financial Times

It s an act of courage to hunt for meaning within grief, particularly if the search upends your life and shakes out the contents for all the world to sift through. Levy embarks on the hunt beautifully. Chicago Tribune

Frank and unflinchingly sincere . . . A gut-wrenching, emotionally charged work of soul-baring writing in the spirit of Joan Didion, Helen Macdonald, and Elizabeth Gilbert . . . A must-read for women. Bustle

Ariel Levy is a writer of uncompromising honesty, remarkable clarity, and surprising humor gathered from the wreckage of tragedy. I am the better for having read this book. Lena Dunham

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. 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

Buchausschnitt
Chapter 1

My favorite game when I was a child was Mummy and Explorer. My father and I would trade off roles: One of us had to lie very still with eyes closed and arms crossed over the chest, and the other had to complain, I ve been searching these pyramids for so many years ­when will I ever find the tomb of Tutankhamun? (This was in the late seventies when Tut was at the Met, and we came in from the suburbs to visit him frequently.) At the climax of the game, the explorer stumbles on the embalmed Pharaoh and ­brace yourself ­the mummy opens his eyes and comes to life. The explorer has to express shock, and then say, So, what s new? To which the mummy replies, You.

I was not big on playing house. I preferred make-­believe that revolved around adventure, starring pirates and knights. I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort my parents built from a kit in the backyard, where I sorted through the acorns and onion grass I gathered for sustenance. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at ease ­I was self-­reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.

Books are the other natural habitat for a child who loves words and adventures, and I was content when my parents read me Moby-­Dick, Pippi Longstocking, or The Hobbit. I decided early that I would be a writer when I grew up. That, I thought, was the profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses.

I started keeping a diary in the third grade and, in solidarity with Anne Frank, I named it and personified it and made it my confidante. The point that prompted me to keep a diary in the first place: I don t have a friend, Frank told Kitty, her journal. Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God. My lined notebooks were the only place I could say as much as I wanted, whenever I wanted. To this day I feel comforted and relieved of loneliness, no matter how foreign my surroundings, if I have a pad and a pen.

As a journalist, I ve spent nearly two decades putting myself in foreign surroundings as frequently as possible. There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It s like having a new lover ­even the parts you aren t crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.

The first story I ever published was about another world only an hour from my apartment. I was twenty-­two, living in the East Village in a sixth-­floor walk-­up with a roommate and roaches, working as an assistant at New York magazine. My friend Mayita was an intern in the photo department who knew about a nightclub for obese women in Queens. We talked about it during our lunch break, when we were walking around midtown Manhattan with our plastic containers of limp salad, dreading going back to the office.

I was not a key member of the staff. It was my job to take the articles the writers faxed over and type them into the computer system ­it was 1996, email was still viewed as a curious phenomenon that might blow over. Also, I had to input the crossword puzzle by looking back and forth between the paper the puzzle-­crafter sent me and my computer screen, trying to remember if it went black, black, white, black, or black, white, black, black. I was in a constant state of embittered self-­righteousness at the office. How had I been mistaken for a charwoman? Mayita was similarly horrified by the tumble her status had taken: As a senior at Wesleyan just a few months before, she had been the next Sally