The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy

The bestselling exploration of the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy. A New York Times Notable Book A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book of 2018 What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson. The Cost of Living, longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy’s acclaimed novels.

For en nydelig hverdagslig bok om hverdagslige ting som skinner som en stjerne.

Essayaktig memoar om livet etter 50.

What a breathtakingly beautiful book. Such powerful writing

“I have never wanted to cover the past in dust sheets to preserve it from change.”

I went into this hoping for some life advice, it's hard to find in reality and even more difficult to pull from fiction most days. I found something better. I found a woman reinventing herself and pondering the small things in life: work, the road she rides her bike on, and examples of her friends' relationships that I took as warning signs.
I will think of birds and people who avert their eyes when they speak to you in a different light for awhile.
I'm probably not literary enough to truly appreciate Levy's writings. Clearly, she is well read. Some of her words rang so true to me, but are not constructed so complexly that I can imagine them as a quote on a pretty image on Tumblr or to be inked on a t shirt (not an insult). Still, I loved this because it takes a huge amount of hubris to sit down and write your inner thoughts, publish them and share them with the world. I'm thankful she did. I wish more wizened women did. I'm at the point where I don't want to read any memoirs from people under 40. They are still cooking, and I want to pick over the leftovers of a finished meal.