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. Ariel Levy embarks on the hunt beautifully in her new memoir ... The Rules Don't Apply is a search for meaning, not reason. It doesn't seek an explanation (outside of the medical one) for the death of Levy's son, any more than it seeks to explain away the love, fear, frustration and other experiences and emotions that take place within her lifetime. Her grief becomes a new part of her — something to understand and get used to ... She's brave and generous to share her story, which manages to be beautiful, even as it's stark and wrenching.
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. Without giving away her story, I don’t think you can beat this as a trailer for the turmoil unleashed in her one-of-a-kind memoir: 'And the truth is, the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic. There is nothing I would trade them for. There is no place I would rather have seen.'
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 ... 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 ... 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 fully rise to meet the call of its strongest moments.
...if Levy-as-narrator is to be believed, she spent the vast majority of her adult life feeling impervious to loss, deprivation, or insurmountable obstacles—and it’s feminism’s fault ... The conviction she’s describing actually belongs as much, if not more, to whiteness than to mainstream feminism—which is also called 'white feminism' for this very reason. It’s unlikely many Black women or Arab women or undocumented women would presume a similar degree of permission and mobility, regardless of their exposure to Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. This matters because, inexcusably, The Rules buys into and therefore reinforces the corrosive lie that feminism was, is, or should be a promise made to each woman that whatever she wants, she can have; that feminism is first and foremost about a 'you' rather than about an 'us' because its power (and importance) is conscribed to the individual instead of the collective ... As a result of this blindness, The Rules Do Not Apply is a monument to obliviousness, an unwitting testament to the ability of whiteness and class to supersede other markers of social identity like sexuality and gender.
It’s Levy’s voice in The Rules Do Not Apply that wins us over, at once commanding and vulnerable ... one feels that the subtlety of Levy’s politics doesn’t achieve the subtlety of her prose, tending instead toward the polemical...Levy may be the most retrogressive progressive writer we have ... And what a writer she is. Her memoir is all tough immediacy, every detail sharp as India ink ... One finishes the book thinking of Levy’s awe when she met Caster Semenya. 'She didn’t look like a teenage girl, or a teenage boy,' Levy writes. 'She looked like something else, something magnificent.'”
As a journalist, Levy has delved into wild tales of 1970s lesbian separatists, South African marathoners, and modern ayahuasca disciples. In these keenly intimate essays, she turns the lens inward, recounting professional highs and personal lows (the brutal ruin of a marriage, a harrowing miscarriage) with lucid, unflinching immediacy. If Levy comes off as self-lacerating and self-regarding in equal measure, well, you can’t spell memoir without a 'me' and an 'i'…and her 'me' is still more interesting than most.
...a short, sharp American memoir in the Mary Karr tradition of life-chronicling. Which is to say that Levy, like Karr, is a natural writer who is also as unsparing and bleakly hilarious as it’s possible to be about oneself ... The book ends where it begins, in the aftermath of the whirlwind of events that upends this woman’s controlled, self-determined world. I devoured her story in one sitting. It felt, well, greedy. But 'greedy' is how the author characterises herself, so it seemed fine, hopeful even, to read her work in the same way, perhaps absorbing as I went a tiny bit of Levy’s remarkable resilience and appetite for life.
Woe to anyone picking up this slim collection who, steered wrong by its title, expects suburban-book-club fodder or ecstatic, dance-like-no-one's-watching self-affirmation. Deb Olin Unferth's sophomore volume of stories is more a cauldron of simmering desperation than a sisterhood of traveling pants ... Unferth has always been a wild talent in search of an appropriate form...Wait Till You See Me Dance confirms that the short story (and, albeit less reliably, the very, very short story) is her best vessel ... Ultimately, it is the longer-form stories in Wait Till You See Me Dance that make the collection memorable. Unferth might sprawl and meander at novel length, and her microfiction can occasionally seem breezy or abrupt—but somewhere in the middle, this author finds her sweet spot, stoking emotional intensity over the course of a mere handful of pages.
She writes in order to make a narrative out of the chaos she creates, so that she is simultaneously in control and out of it ... In keeping with her febrile nature, Levy’s prose is dynamic, molten with verbs and with images of light, movement and change ... Memoirs are popular at the moment, challenging the traditional, less mobile biography. Levy’s is a breathtakingly good example of how this form can be deft, light-footed and audacious.
Every now and then, a book comes along that you will love forever. The Rules Do Not Apply is that book for me; since reading it, I’ve been touting it, teaching it, conversing with it ... Levy is brilliant at collaging the pieces of her life into a compelling story. Stories embed in other stories, because the character Levy, like the narrator Levy, is a storyteller ... Levy is so good at conveying the pendulum swings of fate and the privilege of good luck. And she’s got a hell of a story to tell. The voice, the character, the cinematography, if you will—the imagery and how it’s created—kept me gripped and entertained, choked up and chortling ... Virtually living through Levy’s story is devastating and exquisite. It takes us to the bone truths about expectations and love, about this particular generation, and about learning the rules the hard way.
The memoir built around that essay ["Thaksgiving in Mongolia"] never reaches the same heights as the original manifestation ... This is an essayist’s memoir, not a novelist’s. Levy presents scenes from her life like a series of loosely related studies of a feminist version of Macbeth’s o’erweening ambition. The book’s approach can be frustrating. Explanations and through lines are replaced by considerations of subjects as they crop up in her life ... In offering the backstory of a marriage gone sour and the tumultuous aftermath of coming home unpregnant, the encapsulated shriek of Levy’s original essay becomes muted and dispersed. She is now a woman whose plans have become sand spilling through her fingers, still learning that loss is neither something you deserve nor can escape.
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.
Levy is an incredibly talented writer who has built a solid body of work, but The Rules Do Not Apply does not have the same energy that her magazine writing is known for. There are glimpses of raw emotion — when she explores her ambivalence and guilt over her affair or the aftermath of the birth and death of her son — but for the most part the reader is left with the fact that a promising lede doesn’t always deliver.
Levy’s crushing sense of self-chastisement looms over her new memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, which expands on 'Thanksgiving in Mongolia.' I gulped the book down, both because I love her voice—brassy and mordant, but also luminous and kind—and because, since that New Yorker piece, I’ve worried about her ... There’s a dark current of guilt running through this book that makes me terribly sad for Levy and that may terrify readers who have the temerity to wish for both exciting lives and stable families ... Part of what makes her book at once so gripping and so unnerving is that she leaves little distance between her authorial voice and the raw immediacy of anguish; her pain feels unprocessed, but that could be by design. Still, the way she frames herself as a cautionary tale seems unhealthy, for herself as well as her audience.
...[a] dark and absorbing memoir ... 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.
A remarkable thing about Ms. Levy’s work is how she looks back at her actions with unflinching honesty about her regrets; her memories are forever clouded with her knowledge of the painfully random nature of life, and she never wastes an opportunity to chastise herself ... Still, her need to explain the mistakes she feels she has made — her affair with an ex-lover, in particular, is subjected to a lot of what can be boiled down to 'what was I thinking?' — stands in contrast to the overall thesis: 'Everybody doesn’t get everything: as natural and unavoidable as mortality.' Whether this conflict is intentional is unclear ... The Rules Do Not Apply is not an easy read, and for people who are perhaps still laboring under the illusion that they have control over their lives, its downbeat tone might be a bit much to bear. For anyone who has ever grieved, though, not only does the book serve as a testament to the obliterating nature of loss, but it also offers hope.
