It’s been a minute!

I have come out of hibernation to talk about The Cost of Living, by Deborah Levy (as you may have gathered by the post’s title – it’s late and I couldn’t think of anything pithy). I don’t remember how I learned about this book – I think it was in one of those “best books of the summer lists” and whoever it was that had chosen it raved about Levy’s work so much that I got this and three more of her books.

In The Cost of Living, Levy reflects on the end of her marriage and her attempt to create a new life and normalcy for her and her daughters. Her account is woven through with simple, yet meaningful, stories of encounters with strangers and friends that prompt introspection and foster empathy for and understanding of both herself and others.

The complete disassembling and rebuilding of one’s life seems ripe for drama and garment-rending. But Levy avoids guttural howls of pain, telling her story not from its turbulent center, but at a safe distance. It is gentle and quiet, as told by a person who knows she has not only survived this, but created a comfortable – and comforting – way to live anew. It feels like a peaceful oasis of calm in the current climate of vapid reality show screeching and a president of the United States that lacks both dignity and an indoor voice.

Levy rarely focuses on the details of the marriage itself and if you’re looking for a play-by-play account of a relationship falling apart, you should pick another book. But if what you need this summer is to know that women are strong and resilient, able to walk away from the remains of familiarity and security to find freedom and happiness, to gather around them other strong women and good friends, to process pain and find joy in small things, and to come out the other side a wiser, more fulfilled person, then this book won’t disappoint.

I didn't realize this was part of an autobiographical project Deborah Levy had already started (the first being Things I Don't Want to Know) she calls "working autobiography," but after enjoying this one so much, I will definitely go back and read the others, past and future.

I can't quote from my copy because it is an advanced readers copy, but that would take forever as I believe I highlighted half of it. It's about reinventing herself at 50, of leaving a marriage that wasn't working, of forming a new relationship with her daughters, of hitting her creative stride right as life required the most attention, of creating a new space for her writing, of redefining feminism and femininity, etc. She also talks about how the illness and death of her mother informed her two most recent novels, Hot Milk and Swimming Home. She also said it was all these events that caused her to shift into writing in the first person for the first time. Has anyone noticed this? It made my understanding of her work click in place in a way it hadn't quite.

"…When words close the mind, we can be sure that someone has been reduced to nothingness…"

This book immediately engaged me. Powerfully. Levy drew me in and held me tight. I was somewhat surprised.

"…We either die of the past or we become an artist.
Proust had reached for this same thought and came up with something that better suited this phase in my life:
Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart…"

Levy is dealing with it, the cost of living, and most honorably and with feeling. Similar to a novel, this memoir is ripe with characters and recurring events. A very adroit and distinguished work to hold in our hands.

"…The writing life is mostly about stamina…"

It matters little whether Levy is undoing her past life or restarting it. She is living, and suffering, and accomplishing so much on the page. Already I lament that this book will end. It could go on and on, but unfortunately, it doesn’t.

"…Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely… "

Above all else, it is an act of immense generosity to be the architect of everyone else’s well-being.

The task is still mostly perceived as women’s work.

There is a lot to chew on in this short ‘Working Autobiography’ by Deborah Levy. Thinking about the pressing weight of not just the roles women are forced to play but of the love we carry and let alter us, sometimes reducing, sometimes expanding isn’t an easy bone to chew on. Levy is leaving her marriage, a common enough occurrence in our modern times, but no less than death of the familiar. She must become someone separate from who she was. It is hours of intimacy with powerful thoughts and feelings. Sharing the story about a woman whose husband never looks at her, Levy is able to imagine the many things it can mean but be sure, it is one of the most awful cruelties a woman can suffer, especially since it doesn’t appear as violent as it feels. How do myths play a part in the structure of a woman’s life? Even at our strongest, we cave.

There are those who will cut a woman down at the knees, to keep her from rising too high, from ‘eclipsing’ men. What can you do with yourself if I refuse to see you? How is a woman to become when she is too busy reducing herself as not to become too much? Thinking about the Medusa Myth Levy brings up, I had stray thoughts about women who ‘talk to much’, the ‘big mouth bitches’. Being an audience for rowdy men coming of age when I did, I always remember incidents when a woman was dismissed with those ugly labels. It was always ridiculous to me, even when I was too young to really comprehend gender issues, that the loudest man in the room could call anyone a big mouth simply for having thoughts and opinions, or for daring to disagree with him. There is no bigger insult than being dismissed, reduced to a joke. Love doesn’t ask you to hide, to dilute yourself. I don’t think that women, as a whole, feel nearly as threatened by their partners success. No, they’re too busy feeling ashamed for feeling proud of their accomplishments, as if they’re stealing thunder, as if there isn’t enough to go around. Maybe these things change with each generation, but that Simone de Beauvoir’s voice makes as much sense today as it did then tells me things aren’t as progressive as we think.

The tender moment she shares with us about her dying mother was my undoing. Our mothers truly are a mystery and as much as we love them, it’s hard to allow them room for a self separate from the nurturer we always expect to show up. Not even if we become mothers ourselves. Our mothers are gravity. Children get jealous if their mother’s attention is divided, it’s a funny thing. Husbands too. We forgive them nothing, though we are kinder to our father’s, I believe we feel safer to be ourselves with our mothers. We hold them to impossible standards, and we don’t want them to be more than what we need them to be. Being a woman is an exhausting endeavour, it is not for the cowardly.

The topic of language, about expressing ourselves, how healthy it is, I always wonder about writers, that maybe we have this irrepressible need to scream with written words. I also wonder what all our mothers would have shouted if they all lifted a pen and were able to release their inner lives. Such work is all consuming selfishness though isn’t it, if you’re a woman?

“Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong.” That’s a loaded sentence, in order to discover who we are we rage against what we don’t want to be. I am not this, I am not that, and I may not know what I am but I know what I’m not at least. I know my thoughts are splitting in many directions but that’s the type of book this is. There are so many questions no one asks of us that we so badly need to answer. Oh and how about “Things I Don’t Want to Know” of which the older we get, there are plenty! Well, I’ll take my mind, overcrowded with thoughts, brimming over with things I don’t want to know, that I can’t unknow and try to sleep.

This is an intelligent work and I wish it were longer.

Publication Date: July 10, 2018

Bloomsbury USA