Ariel Levy

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.

Ariel Levy is a writer of uncompromising honesty, remarkable clarity and surprising humor, gathered from the wreckage of tragedy. Her account of life doing its darnedest to topple her, and her refusal to be knocked down, will leave you shaken and inspired.

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.

[P]rofound, and lasting. Growing out of an essay called "Thanksgiving in Mongolia," The Rules Do Not Apply reveals what happens when nature decides to smash the plans you've made, and derail what you thought was your life.

[A] beautifully crafted, harrowing account…  Levy’s new memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, is…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… 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.  

A thoroughly modern memoir, the elements of The Rules Do Not Apply seem plucked not from the script of Girls, which has also been exploring reproductive issues of late, but Transparent — even Portlandia...“When ‘Thanksgiving in Mongolia’ landed on his desk, [David] Remnick said he read it right away, against his habit. ‘I couldn’t get out of my chair,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if I hadn’t known what had happened; we had been talking even when she was still there. The world is full of personal essays. My illness. My divorce. My delight. They are everywhere. Arguably there are too many. Among the average ones, there’s a kind of grasping aspect to them. When they connect, as Ari’s did, there’s really nothing like it.’

[Fierce] and beautiful memoir.

The message [in The Rules Do Not Apply] is: while we might think our choices make us who we are, actually, it’s the things we have no choice over that truly make us.

[The Rules Do Not Apply] is 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…. As Levy’s life starts to spin out of her control (an affair, failure to conceive, refusal to acknowledge her wife’s drinking problem) the reason for calling this book The Rules Do Not Apply becomes clear. She is beating tradition, is indeed the protagonist of her own life. But she finds, after the catastrophe of miscarrying while on a magazine assignment abroad, that “The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing”. 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.

In reflecting on her own life, 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. It’s a delicate balance, one rarely pulled off. 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, and have followed her work for years, which made interviewing her a slight struggle. I had to navigate around what personally resonated with me and what would mean a great deal to others…. [I]f you take anything away from our conversation, I hope it’s that you should read The Rules Do Not Apply.

It’s Levy’s voice in The Rules Do Not Apply that wins us over, at once commanding and vulnerable.

[F]rank and unflinchingly sincere… A gut-wrenching, emotionally charged work of soul-baring writing in the spirit of Joan Didion, Helen Macdonald, and Elizabeth Gilbert, The Rules Do Not Apply is a must read for women. 

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 Do Not 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.

Ariel Levy’s The Rules Do Not Apply is this year’s must-read memoir.

Levy…examines the tension between wanting both a life of adventure and the stability of a relationship—autonomy and intimacy—in The Rules Do Not Apply… [S]he unflinchingly recounts the rapid collapse of that life… Every raw event provides further proof that even when you…think you’ve found the answers, there’s no guarantee it will last, much less make you ‘happy.’ But Levy’s book is no cautionary tale. That’s partially because she maintains her smart, wry sense of humor; she’s still intact. It’s also because she just keeps on moving… Her upended life looks nothing like what she laid the foundation for, but then, there’s no cutoff date by which she has to have it all nailed down.

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.

Ariel Levy’s 2013 essay “Thanksgiving in Mongolia” is one of the best pieces of nonfiction I have ever read.  If I taught a class on the essay, I would make every damn student memorize it. Levy, a staff writer at The New Yorker expanded on this essay into a full memoir out in March, The Rules Do Not Apply.  I read it in one big messy gulp, because it is beautiful and heartbreaking and unruly and real.  You should preorder it immediately so you can fall into her complicated, funny, and finely-wrought world as soon as humanly possible.