
The Cost of Living: Living Autobiography 2 - Living Autobiography (Paperback)
Deborah Levy (author)Published: 07/02/2019
From the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home.
What does it mean to be free - as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom?
In this dazzling memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom.
Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk - when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end - she is characteristically eloquent on the social expectations and surreal realities of daily life. And expanding far beyond these bounds, she describes a uniquely frank, wise and thrilling manifesto for female experience: embracing the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel.
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
ISBN: 9780241977569
Number of pages: 208
Weight: 152 g
Dimensions: 197 x 130 x 13 mm
MEDIA REVIEWS
'Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to find a new way of living.' - Observer
'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor sharp insights.' - The Financial Times
'It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself... A piece of work that is not so much a memoir as an eloquent manifesto for what Levy calls 'a new way of living' in the post-familial world.' - The Guardian
'Ingenious, practical and dryly amused... This is a manifesto for a risky, radical kind of life, out of your depth but swimming all the same.' - New Statesman
'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy is a brilliant writer... Each sentence is a small masterpiece of clarity and poise. That shed should be endowed with a blue plaque.' - The Telegraph
'A heady, absorbing read.' - The Evening Standard
'This, from Deborah Levy, is exceptional. A memoir of life, art and separation. How to write when you're broke, have no writing space, are a parent. Also: crushed chickens, electric bikes, plumbing. Out in May and an early contender for one of the books of the year.' - Sinead Gleeson
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“Outstanding - Funny and Fierce”
The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy.
This is the second of three autobiographies by Levy. I have the other two. I just got confused about which one to read first and jumped in here. Once I had realised my mistake it...
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“Brilliantly Engaging”
I have to say that part two of Levy’s three-piece memoir set is a different proposition to the first part. And I mean that in a very good way. To some extent I found Things I Don’t Want to Know something if a trial to... More
“The second part of the memoir”
I was sent a copy of The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy to read and review by NetGalley. I really enjoyed this second part of the author’s memoir, but not quite as much as I had the first. There were little... More
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