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Summary
Summary
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
Author Notes
Ariel Levy is an American journalist and writer, born in 1974. She is a graduate of Wesleyan University. Before becoming a writer, she worked for Planned Parenthood and New York magazine. In 2008, she became a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her essay, The Lesbian Bride's Handbook, was published in The Best American Essays 2008. She is the author of two books, Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, and The Rules Do Not Apply: a Memoir.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this dark and absorbing memoir, Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs), a staff writer for the New Yorker, recounts her complicated life and, with stunning clarity, reveals that the best laid plans can be sidetracked. As a child in Larchmont, N.Y., Levy was taught that she could achieve anything she wanted. Her mother encouraged her to make her own rules, with one caveat: never become dependent upon a man. As a successful young writer in the 1990s (first for New York magazine), Levy traveled widely, writing primarily on the topic of sexuality and gender. At 28, she fell in love with and married a 41-year-old woman with substance abuse problems. Though Levy longed for motherhood and a comfortable life, she also had a "compulsion" for adventure. Ten years later she got pregnant with the help of a sperm donor and then suffered a miscarriage while on assignment in Mongolia. Levy took a writerly approach to the narrative of her own life, believing that her personal story would unfold as if she had penned it. Her awakening to the fact that life doesn't always cooperate with one's plan is raw and compelling. Though some of the lessons learned in this memorable story are painful, Levy ultimately finds redemption in her ability to glimpse the light beyond the darkness, and to gain a deepening gratitude for friends, family, and her profession. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs, 2005) won a National Magazine Award in 2014 for her essay Thanksgiving in Mongolia, published in the New Yorker (where she's a staff writer), and this memoir is a sweeping, life-spanning extension of that piece. In her late thirties, Levy suffered a traumatic end to a much-wanted pregnancy. Her marriage, with a woman she adored, was simultaneously falling apart at the seams, stretched thin by addiction and past infidelity. Levy tells many stories here: of her upbringing in suburban New York; of her ferocious, dovetailing pursuits of a career in journalism and a life of adventure; of her parents, friends, and lovers. Levy writes of the sudden panic over her fertility (One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time), the golden solution found in a male friend who wanted to father and also provide for Levy and her wife's child, and the bottomless depths of the resulting loss. Levy's generous portrait of modern feminism at turns bleak, heartrending, inspired, and hopeful speaks strongly and directly to readers.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IN NOVEMBER 2013, Ariel Levy published an essay in The New Yorker that quickly went viral: "Thanksgiving in Mongolia" is a beautifully crafted, harrowing account of giving birth to a baby after 19 weeks of pregnancy, a baby who lived for only a few minutes. I had already admired Levy for years - as a journalist, and a chronicler of human life in its oddity and yearning - and the essay lodged inside me in the way that truly moving writing burrows into your sense of the world and takes up residence for good. For all my admiration, though, I never once hoped her essay would become a book. It was such a perfect essay. Why would it need to become anything else? Levy's new memoir, "The Rules Do Not Apply," is much more than just an extension of that essay. It's an account of a marriage and its dissolution, a female writer's coming-of-age, a woman reckoning with the various cultural scripts that have been written for her gender. But the emotional core of this book is undeniably that loss, and its strongest writing still revolves around it, as if compelled by its unrelenting gravity. Of her son, she writes: "I saw him under my closed eyelids like an imprint from the sun." Turning from the essay to the book is an education in the messiness of grief. No story is as simple as its streamlined version in the pages of a magazine, and though there was little that felt traditionally slick or elided in Levy's essay - it was skillfully and purposefully unvarnished - her memoir opens its camera aperture to show more of the complicated before-and-after around its epicenter: infidelity, alcoholism, ambivalence and estrangement. There's a deep generosity in Levy's willingness to acknowledge that trauma is rarely dignified or simple; her writing offers readers a salve against the loneliness of feeling that one's own sorrow should feel more elegant or pure. Whenever I teach Levy's essay, and I teach it frequently, my students often praise it for being "unsentimental." I know what they mean, that it doesn't seem to be asking for sympathy, or resolving difficult experience into an easily digested moral, but what I admire about that essay, and what I admire about the strongest passages of this book, is Levy's refusal to evade emotion. She risks the full tilt of feeling. "Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled," she writes, and she gives us the song of that vulnerable land. She renders overwhelming sorrow with precise brush strokes and eerie constellations of details: a cellphone photo, a Snickers bar, the smoggy Mongolian sky. One moral of "The Rules Do Not Apply" is that, mostly, they do. Levy discovers she is not exempted from certain hard truths: Fate is arbitrary and beyond our control. No one ever gets everything she wants. These are hardly revelations, and one would have to live under an incredible umbrella of luck and privilege to stay away from them for long, but they are certainly insights worth exploring from inside the particularity of a life - how the delusions of exceptionality and infinite possibility get punctured. One of the fundamental refrains of this book is the idea that our lives are not the same as the stories we want to tell about our lives, or the scripts we want our lives to follow. Over and over again, Levy acknowledges the hubris involved in thinking she could control the plotline of her life: "Nothing really bad could happen to me in my movie, because I was the protagonist," she writes, describing youthful delusion. Years later, she finds herself at a friend's birthday party in Westchester, where a stranger asks her: "Are you the Ariel who all the bad things happened to?" THIS BOOK is haunting; it is smart and engaging. It was so engrossing that I read it in a day. But it's also a deeply uneven book whose power in some moments only illuminates the absence of this force elsewhere. Its strongest sections illuminate the hollowness of passages that lean hard on cursory insights instead of probing beneath the surface of their easy summations to excavate more precisely articulated truths. I found sweeping summary ("somehow, things got better") or the flattening displacement of the aphoristic second person ("You have an affair because you are not getting what you want from your loved one") where I wanted rigorously specific introspection. There is much to love about Levy's writing when it's operating on full throttle: She is unsparing with herself. She devotes real estate on the page to the perspectives of other people. She makes fascinating observations about the relationship between her reportage and her evolving sense of identity. She's funny as hell; in a way that made me grateful for 200 pages of her company. But everything I loved about Levy's voice - her intelligence, her candor, her sense of humor - also made me feel disappointed by the ways this book didn't fuliy rise to meet the call of its strongest moments. Some of the most wrenching parts of this book are Levy's precise observations of her own desire to have her loss witnessed: correcting strangers who call her experience a miscarriage or a stillbirth, showing them the cellphone photo she took of her son during the moments before he died. This need to specify the terms of grief - to make it legible - is deeply human and deeply moving. It's not a bid for sympathy but an attempt to honor what happened. Levy has done that here, mapped the force of what happened - written an imperfect account of the imperfect art of surviving loss. ? A stranger asks her: 'Are you the Ariel who all the bad things happened to?' LESLIE JAMISON is the author of "The Empathy Exams" and a Bookends columnist for the Book Review.
Kirkus Review
An award-winning journalist tells the story of how her formerly charmed life in which "lost things could always be replaced" came to a brutally abrupt end.In the late 1990s, Levy (Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, 2005) was a young assistant at New York magazine trying to make it as a writer. "Greedylike a hungry cat" for success, she aggressively sought out the connections that led to more high-profile assignments and eventually, in 2008, a coveted position as a staff writer at the New Yorker. By this time, she was living the promise of second-wave feminism that women "could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us." Not only did she have a thriving writing career that took her around the world and made her the toast of New York literary circles. She had also defied convention: at a time when gay marriage was not yet legal, she married a woman. Lucy was the love of her life and the person to whom she had sworn her first, but not only, allegiance. As though to prove her sexual freedom, Levy then had an affair with a trans man and confessed it to Lucy, who began drinking heavily. "I lived in a state of bewilderment punctuated by fury and aching guilt," she writes. As their broken relationship began to mend, a male friend looking to become a parent "butat a distance" agreed to donate his sperm to Levy, who successfully became pregnant. Yet the shadow of Lucy's alcoholism hung over her life. While on assignment in Mongolia, the author lost her baby, and her marriage to Lucy imploded not long afterward. The honesty with which Levy confronts her youthful hubris and its consequences makes powerfully compelling reading. With dignity and grace, this former golden girl eloquently acknowledges how the fact that "everybody doesn't get everything" in life is "as natural and unavoidable as mortality." Unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The author, in a smooth and careful style, narrates this short and haunting story. Levy is a journalist who uses words to make meaning of her life, whether in her personal journal or in her work. Here, she recounts the time when she was in a committed gay relationship, became pregnant by artificial insemination, and gave birth to her son prematurely in a hotel room in Mongolia. At the same time, Levy's partner went into rehab for alcoholism, and Levy lost her home to debt her partner had incurred. Levy later developed an email relationship with the doctor who assisted her and through the writing begins a healing process. Narrator Levy is not as skilled as writer Levy but uses her inflections as a tool to drive the narrative so that the listener wants to hear what's going to happen next. The harsh realities described are not always made real by the voice, but the solid writing prevails. Verdict Recommended for large public libraries and university autobiography collections. ["Levy uses her considerable talents, presented in raw, genuinely felt prose, to bring readers into deeply personal experiences that resonate on a visceral level": LJ 4/15/17 review of the Random hc.]-Karen Perry, Old Dominion Univ., Norfolk, VA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
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 Mann. Now she alphabetized negatives all day. (When we expressed subdued versions of our outrage to our elders, their responses invariably included the phrase "paying your dues." It was not a phrase we cared for.) We decided not to wait for someone at the office to give us permission to do what we really wanted. We took the subway about a million stops into Queens and went to a cavernous bar in Rego Park where women who weighed hundreds of pounds went to dance and flirt with their admirers and have lingerie pageants at four in the morning. It was very dark in there. The air smelled stagnant and sweaty and the drinks were so strong they fumed. But the women were magnificent, like enormous birds: feathery false eyelashes fluttering, tight, shiny dresses in peacock blue and canary yellow, the dim light reflecting off their sequins. Mayita and I stood out. We were puny, dressed in jeans and drab sweaters, little pigeons. It was scary, but electrifying: What we're writing is more important than your anxiety and humiliation, my competent self told me. So I went up to complete strangers with my notepad, and asked them to tell me their stories. And they did. They told me about being fat little girls, or about how they got fat after they had children. They said they were sick of being ashamed, sick of apologizing for taking up so much space, so they'd come to believe that big was beautiful (or at least they'd come to believe it some of the time). They had passionate admirers, but it was difficult because they could never be sure if the men they dated--the "chubby chasers"--loved them for themselves, or for their fat. For their fat! I marveled on the way back to my apartment from the subway at 5 a.m. in the fading darkness. The Manhattan around me in the late nineties was glossy, greedy, hard. The slim women on Madison Avenue, on television, with their clicking heels and ironed-straight hair, gripped thousand-dollar handbags covered with interlocking G's. The restaurants people wanted to get into were sleek and ferociously expensive--nobody talked about farm to table; nobody wanted to see rough-hewn reclaimed wood. It was the genesis of Internet culture, and people my age kept making enormous sums of money on start-ups, on all sorts of things. A friend at work optioned the first big article she published at the magazine to a producer for half a million dollars when she was only twenty-five. (It was about the rich young publicists who maintained the city's nocturnal hierarchy, wielding their guest lists and their gift bags. "Most of us have as much power as older guys in suits," one of them said. "And soon enough we'll have more.") There was no undercurrent of fear, very little pull against the prevailing tide of self-interest at that time. My generation had never experienced a real, prolonged war. Nobody thought about terrorism. Even climate change still seemed like something that could be safely ignored until the distant future--perhaps we would prevent it by recycling our soda cans. There was an unapologetic ethos of consumption in New York City, which the magazine I worked for both satirized and promoted. I found it alluring and alienating by turns. So to locate an underworld of women who simply opted out of that slick culture, whose very bodies were unmistakable monuments of resistance, was thrilling. As I wrote my story (which turned out to be a lot harder than I'd imagined it would), I felt I was describing an exotic universe with its own aesthetic and manners, but even more, I was writing about an unconventional kind of female life. What does it mean to be a woman? What are the rules? What are your options and encumbrances? I wanted to tell stories that answered, or at least asked, those questions. I was giddy when an editor at the magazine said that they would publish my article and Mayita's photos, and pay us for them. (They gave the story what is still the best headline I've ever had: women's lb.) That article fee was special money, magic money--a reward for doing something that was its own reward. It was also two thousand dollars, which was more than my monthly take-home pay. Usually, it was a stretch to cover the cost of subway tokens and the rent on my grimy, depressing apartment. But after I got paid for my story, I went to the fancy salad bar at lunchtime for weeks. I took heedless scoops of the beets with blood-orange segments; I piled sliced steak next to them with abandon. Writing was the solution to every problem--financial, emotional, intellectual. It had kept me company when I was a lonely child. It gave me an excuse to go places I would otherwise be unlikely to venture. It satisfied the edict my mother had issued many times throughout my life: "You have to make your own living; you never want to be dependent on a man." And it made me feel good, like there was a reason for me. "It is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story," Virginia Woolf said in an address to the National Society for Women's Service, a group of female professionals, in 1931. "It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories." I'd been promoted to staff writer by the time I fell in love, when I was twenty-eight. I got married a few years later--we all did. As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony. There were several years of peace, but then the pregnancies started popping. I found this unsettling. To become a mother, I feared, was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own life. Your questions were answered, your freedom was gone, your path would calcify in front of you. And yet it still pulled at me. Being a professional explorer would become largely impossible if I had a child, but having a kid seemed in many ways like the wildest possible trip. Sometimes, on the long flights I took for my stories, I would listen to a Lou Reed song called "Beginning of a Great Adventure" on my iPod or in my head. It's about impending parenthood: "A little me or he or she to fill up with my dreams / A way of saying life is not a loss." As my friends, one after the next, made the journey from young woman to mother, it glared at me that I had not. Some of my friends were outraged to discover that reproduction was not necessarily a simple mission. Can you believe I'm still not pregnant? they would ask, embittered, distraught, as their sex lives became suffused by grim determination, and they endured inseminations, in vitro, hormone injections, humiliation. I've been trying for a year . . . two . . . five. I've spent six thousand dollars on these doctors . . . eight thousand . . . forty thousand. I listened to them. I said things that I hoped sounded comforting. But the thought in my head was always, Of course. It wasn't as though the research had just come in: Fertility wanes as the years accrue. We all knew this to be true. But somehow we imagined we could get around it. We lived in a world where we had control of so much. If we didn't want to carry groceries up the steps, we ordered them online and waited in our sweatpants on the fourth floor for a man from Asia or Latin America to come panting up, encumbered with our cat litter and organic bananas. If we wanted to communicate with one another when we were on opposite ends of the earth, we picked up devices that didn't exist when we were young and sent each other texts, emails, pictures we'd taken seconds earlier without any film. Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn't play by those rules. We were raised to think we could do what we wanted--we were free to be you and me! And many of our parents' revolutionary dreams had actually come true. A black man really could be president. It was sort of okay to be gay--gay married, even. You could be female and have an engrossing career and you didn't have to be a wife or mother (although, let's face it, it still seemed advisable: Spinsterhood never exactly lost its taint). Sometimes our parents were dazzled by the sense of possibility they'd bestowed upon us. Other times, they were aghast to recognize their own entitlement, staring back at them magnified in the mirror of their offspring. Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism. I always get terrified before I travel. I become convinced that this time I won't be able to figure out the map, or communicate with non-English-speakers, or find the people I need in order to write the story I've been sent in search of. I will be lost and incompetent and vulnerable. So it was with childbearing: I was afraid for almost a decade. I didn't like childhood, and I was afraid that I'd have a child who didn't, either. I was afraid I would be an awful mother. And I was afraid of being grounded, sessile--stuck in one spot for twenty years of oboe lessons and math homework that I hadn't been able to finish the first time around. I paid attention to what I saw and read on the subject. "A child, yes, is a vortex of anxieties," Elena Ferrante wrote in her novel The Lost Daughter. Her protagonist eventually rips herself away from her children, and enters an experience of the sublime: "Everything starting from zero. No habit, no sensations dulled by predictability. I was I, I produced thoughts not distracted by any concern other than the tangled thread of dreams and desires." If you held a baby all night and day, your hands would not be free to cling to that tangled thread. I once saw an interview with Joni Mitchell in which she explained why she didn't marry Graham Nash and have his babies when they were a couple in the sixties. She turned her back on the domestic dream she had inspired him to canonize: "I'll light the fire, you place the flowers in the vase." After he proposed, Mitchell found herself thinking about her grandmother, a frustrated musician who felt so trapped by motherhood and women's work that one afternoon she "kicked the kitchen door off the hinges." Her life would not be about self-expression. She resigned herself to her reality. Excerpted from The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
