num_pages: 207
description: A gorgeous darkly humorous memoir about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinventionfor readers of Cheryl Strayed and Joan Didion When thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012 she was pregnant married financially secure and successful on her own terms. A month later none of that was true. Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation she was raised to resist traditional rulesabout work about love and about womanhood. I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy safety and stimulation reassurance and novelty coziness and thrills. But we cant have it all. In this profound and beautiful memoir Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses. Her own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture of what has changedand of what is eternal.
language: English
title: The Rules Do Not Apply
publisher: Random House