The Rules Do Not Apply

January 2, 2017
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.

January 15, 2017
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. "Greedy...like 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 "but...at 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.

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Starred review from April 15, 2017

For some readers, this stellar work will evoke memories, as author (Female Chauvinist Pigs) and New Yorker staff writer Levy first wrote of the catalyzing events depicted here in a New Yorker piece, "Thanksgiving in Mongolia." However, this account ranges further afield. With intensity and grace, Levy unpacks her courtship, marriage, affair, pregnancy, the premature birth and death of her child, her wife's alcoholism, their separation, and divorce in a scant 200-plus pages, yet her writing feels expansive. Readers will find a compelling meditation on what it means to be female, to be married, and to explore the boundaries and contexts that surround personhood, marriage, desire, and aspiration. This title serves to remind readers, as well as the author, that while rules exist, they need not ultimately define us. VERDICT Levy uses her considerable talents, presented in raw, genuinely felt prose, to bring readers into deeply personal experiences that resonate on a visceral level. (Memoir, 2/20/17; ow.ly/B6Ub30a5C5W)--Rachael Dreyer, Eberly Family Special Collections Lib., Pennsylvania State Univ.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2017
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 feminismat turns bleak, heartrending, inspired, and hopefulspeaks strongly and directly to readers.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)