I read The Cost of Living (2018) by Deborah Levy last week. I tried to wrestle myself out of my extensive reading slump and lack of books that really speaks to me. This book helped. It was one of those I gulped down in a day or two, finding a new page as soon as I could. I loved the writing style and the storytelling. It was crisp and precise in a way that felt familiar while following the author's narration and life experiences.
The book is the second part of Levy's Living Autobiography, pulling from the author's divorce and how her life changed as a result. It also tells a story about the small erasures of women in everyday life. A wife doesn't have a name. A mother must play her role or she's a betrayer. Gender expectations and the many ways a divorce breaks with them and the skill required are also discussed. I loved it.
As a rare dive of mine into autobiographies, I am surprisingly pleased with this pick.
Rating: 5/5 stars.
Some of my favorite parts:
I. "It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character."
II. "To speak our life as we feel it is a freedom we mostly choose not to take, but it seemed to me that the words she wanted to say were lively inside her, mysterious to herself as much as anyone else."
III. "If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world."
IV. "There are only loving and unloving homes. It is the patriarchal story that has been broken. All the same, most children who grow up in that story will struggle, along with everyone else, to compose another one."
V. "Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs."
VI. "It doesn’t take more than three months of living to discover that we are all connected to each other’s cruelty and to each other’s kindness."
VII. "If a man is considered successful because he succeeds in suppressing women (at home, at work, in bed) it would be a great achievement to be a failure in this regard."
VIII. And if she [the mother] moves beyond us, comes close to being a self that is not at our service, she has transgressed from the mythic, primal task of being our protector and nurturer."
IX. "Sometimes we want to unbelong as much as we want to belong."
X. "To become the person someone else had imagined for us is not freedom – it is to mortgage our life to someone else’s fear."
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