*From the twice-Booker-shortlisted author comes a witty and audacious examination of writing and womanhood *
"Life falls apart. We try to get a grip. We try to hold it together. And then we realize that we don't want to hold it together."
Crystalline, witty and audacious, The Cost of Living addresses itself to the dual experiences of writing and of womanhood, examining what is essential in each. Following the acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know , which reflected deeply on the nature of gender politics and a life in letters, The Cost of Living returns to the same subject and to the same life, to find a writer in radical flux. If a woman dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape, how might she describe this new composition? "Words have to open the mind. When words close the mind you can be sure that someone has been reduced to nothingness."
In this elegiac second instalment of her "living autobiography", Deborah Levy considers what it means to live with value and meaning and pleasure. The Cost of Living is a vital and astonishing testimony, as distinctive, wide-ranging and original as Levy's acclaimed novels.
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Review
“What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life—the end of a marriage, the death of a mother—it is about what it is to be alive. I can’t think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf (or, perhaps, Helen Simpson) who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman...This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to ‘find a new way of living’. Rage is brewing just beneath its surface...I read this book with indecent speed and greed, but it deserves to be read at a pace closer to lived time…Levy knows how to share her story.” — The Guardian
“An eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls ‘a new way of living’ in the post-familial world.” —*The Guardian
“[Levy] is an indelible writer...[an] elliptical genius... The Cost of Living ...is always a pleasure to consume.” —Dwight Garner, *The New York Times
“This is a writer who has found her voice and her subject, and both speak directly to our times.” — Los Angeles Times *
“Keen and moving...This timely look at how women are viewed (and often dismissed) by society will resonate with many readers, but particularly with those who have felt marginalized or undervalued.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)*
“Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer... Each sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise. That shed should be endowed with a blue plaque.” —*The Telegraph
“[Levy is] like an expert rafter, and the river she travels is full of encounters and emotions.” — The New York Times
“For writing this good, the cost of living is plainly the right price to pay.” —NPR
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“Levy’s voice has a gentle power that’s rare and wonderful to read…she’s vulnerable but she’s also empowered…Experiencing_ The Cost of Living for the first time…I forgot I was reading. And that’s what great writing does. It immerses you, fills you like an intravenous drug. Reading becomes a form of living.” — The Quietus*
“[Levy is] a master of puns and pithy, surprising twists, often deployed at her own expense…Aphorisms that would usually be heavy-handed…breeze past; only later do you realize you’ve been self-helped.” — _The New Republic
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“A powerful, reflective book that gets under the skin of contemporary prejudices and reveals them for what they are, as present now as they ever were.” — Elephant.art
“The book’s fragmentary form suits its subject. [Levy] is documenting the impact of dismantling a home, packing up a life, and this has the effect of flipping time into a ‘weird shape’…Funny and wise, Levy is the perfect guide through the complexities and contradictions of her new reality.” — _Irish Independent
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“ The Cost of Living is unclassifiable, original, full of unexpected pleasures at every turn. Though it can be read in a flash, I suspect readers will want to savor this book slowly, for its many moments of insight, humor, wisdom, and surprise. Delivered in gorgeous, disciplined prose, Deborah Levy has crafted a bracing, searing inquiry into one woman’s life that manages to tell the truth of all women’s lives. I loved it.” —Dani Shapiro, author of best-selling memoirs _Slow Motion _and __ Devotion
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_ “An elegant, candid meditation on the fraught journey to self-knowledge.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Beautiful, elegiac . . . The power of words to bestow life after death, and the importance of choosing what is living over what is dead, are at the heart of Levy’s exquisite prose.” — The Spectator*
“A robust piece of writing about what gives humans purpose . . . It is a heady, absorbing read.” — *The Evening Standard
_“[A] beautiful yet damning indictment of how our culture effaces women’s creative voices, both directly and insidiously.” —_Library Journal*
“In this evocative and insightful memoir, Levy describes her new freedom, in all its complexity and drudgery, and examines how society’s expectations can define and confine women . . . Levy deftly relates the circumstances of her new life with a bewitching combination of wit and pathos.” —*Booklist
“Slim and spare but highly evocative and allusive, this account of a year in her life — leaving her husband, nursing her dying mother, writing the novels that will change her life — is part of an ongoing project of ‘working autobiography,’ asking and answering the question of how a woman writer should exist in the 21st century.” — Vulture
“What makes Levy remarkable, beyond the endless pleasures of her sentences, is her resourcefulness and wit. She’s ingenious.” — New Statesman
“Searching for something to read after devouring Women and Power? Known for her piquant novels, Deborah Levy now takes to non-fiction, with a 'working autobiography' that comprises thoughtful dissections of life as a woman.” — Elle Magazine, “Here Are the 21 Books We're Most Excited to Read in 2018”
“Levy describes women’s often thankless homemaking enterprise as ‘an act of immense generosity’. It is also a perfect description of this truly joyous book.” — Irish Times
“The result is extraordinary and beautiful. Ranging widely and deeply over marriage, motherhood, love, death and friendship, it is a work suffused with fierce intelligence, generous humanity and razor-sharp insights...Serious, playful, considered and provocative, The Cost of Living is a glorious successor to Things I Don’t Want to Know , an affirmation of the art of living as much as an exploration of its costs.” —*Financial Times
“Each anecdote [is] as luminous, self-contained and hard as the pearls in the necklace she habitually wears around her throat. There's humor here and vulnerability…But above all, The Cost of Living is a smart, slim meditation on womanhood informed by Levy's wide reading. Simone de Beauvoir, Emily Dickinson, James Baldwin, Virginia Woolf — they're just some of the Wise Ones Levy looks to for pointers about how a woman can be, once she has stepped out of her normative role or, as Levy puts it, once she is no longer ‘married to society.’” —*NPR *
“Levy’s vulnerability and uncertainty . . . makes her writing so bold and endearing to read . . . She has a shrewd observer’s eye, which leads to some canny, enjoyable studies of friends and strangers alike and reminds the reader of her strengths as a novelist . . . Levy has a playwright’s knack for conjuring rich detail using incredibly spare and precise language . . . [ The Cost of Living ] is a very slim volume but you should make time and come prepared to savour every phrase.” —Charlotte Graham-McLay, *The Spinoff
“[The Cost of Living is] beaded with glorious cameos and returns to the question of narrating one’s own life, advocating the joy of making a new story when an old one concludes...The Cost of Living circles through the narrator’s writing and reading, especially the work of Simone de Beauvoir, to a vision of walking...towards a home made to please herself, full of writing and love, empty of regret.” —The Australian _
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“‘Being alone doesn’t suit you nearly as much as you think it does,’ a male friend tells Deborah Levy rather patronizingly…But he is wrong. Being alone, and what [she goes] through to get there, suits [her, and she is] fascinating in the telling.” —*Image Magazine
“A short, sharp memoir that ranges across motherhood, writing, art, life, transformation, and everything in between…I devoured in one sitting.” —ArtsHub
“A memoir of a woman creating a new life after divorce and a collection of insightful musings on femininity, motherhood, and the craft and discipline of writing.” — Lilith Magazine
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“How thrilling to read this vivid account by a brilliant woman leaving the marital and maternal we for scary freedom in the land of I. I loved this book!” —Honor Moore, author of_ Red Shoes , Darling , and Memoir*
“A tender, vulnerable book with a fierce strength and intelligence at its core. We sense the courage and honesty Levy required to submerge herself, breath held, fully in the past in order to find her way into a new, altered present.” —Nadja Spiegelman, author of I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
“The writing’s gorgeous and pointed, irresistible to dive into. But it’s the ideas that make this such a compelling and provocative page-turner…This book is many things — edifying, emotional, delicate — but it is not indulgent. It’s so sharp and affecting and filled with wisdom that, just maybe, you’d be fine if it were.” — Entertainment Weekly
About the Author
Deborah Levy, FRSL , writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, widely broadcast on the BBC, and translated into fourteen languages. The author of highly praised novels, including Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved , and Billy and Girl , the story collection Black Vodka , and the essay Things I Don't Want to Know ,__ she lives in London.