The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir by Ariel Levy (PDF)

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “This Year’s Must-Read Memoir” (W magazine) about the choices a young woman makes in her search for adventure, meaning, and love NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Vogue • Time • Esquire • Entertainment Weekly • The Guardian • Harper’s Bazaar • Library Journal • NPR All her life, Ariel Levy was told that she was too fervent, too forceful, too much. As a young woman, she decided that becoming a writer would perfectly channel her strength and desire. She would be a professional explorer—“the kind of woman who is free to do whatever she chooses.” Levy moved to Manhattan to pursue her dream, and spent years of adventure, traveling all over the world writing stories about unconventional heroines, following their fearless examples in her own life. But when she experiences unthinkable heartbreak, Levy is forced to surrender her illusion of control. In telling her story, Levy has captured a portrait of our time, of the shifting forces in American culture, of what has changed and what has remained. And of how to begin again. Praise for The Rules Do Not Apply“Unflinching and intimate, wrenching and revelatory, Ariel Levy’s powerful memoir about love, loss, and finding one’s way shimmers with truth and heart on every page.”—Cheryl Strayed“Every deep feeling a human is capable of will be shaken loose by this profound book. Ariel Levy has taken grief and made art out of it.”—David Sedaris “Beautifully crafted . . . This book is haunting; it is smart and engaging. It was so engrossing that I read it in a day.”—The New York Times Book Review “Levy’s wise and poignant memoir is the voice of a new generation of women, full of grit, pathos, truth, and inspiration. Being in her presence is energizing and ennobling. Reading her deep little book is inspiring.”—San Francisco Book Review“Levy has the rare gift of seeing herself with fierce, unforgiving clarity. And she deploys prose to match, raw and agile. She plumbs the commotion deep within and takes the measure of her have-it-all generation.”—The Atlantic“Cheryl Strayed meets a Nora Ephron movie. You’ll laugh, ugly cry, and finish it before the weekend’s over.”—theSkimm

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I started this book with prejudice. I thought: How pretentious for someone to write a memoir in their early forties without the urgency of a sand-clock terminal illness, or the jubilee of a great discovery. I knew nothing about the author, her accomplished profiles for The New Yorker, or her personal life.For the first chapters I felt my suspicions confirmed. I read her incipient views on sex as a teenager: “When I first learned about sex, I was excited because it seemed like something that could prove useful for quantifying betrayal” (p. 31). And feminism: “a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us” (p. 69). And then on her upper-middle class fear of under-accomplishment and her proclivity to infidelity. Her ruminations on life are colorful, honest and occasionally insightful.Right when I was going to give up I felt something ominous brewing beneath the words. Something in her relationship was intuitively amiss; “We’re just in a hell of our own making half the time.” (p. 79), she remarks on her relationship during casual conversation. I felt the description was cloaked in self-deceit, and that a time bomb was triggered at the beginning of the book, unbeknownst to a casual reader. So I kept reading. That something turned out to be deep and universal: the pain from chaos paying an unexpected visit to someone’s life.Her recount of loss, heartbreak and grief made my heart race in that uneasy, empathetic way of shared experience. “Grief is another world. Like the carnal world, it is one where reason doesn’t work.” (pp. 149-150). The sense of void that follows from a painful loss is disarming, and forces rationalizations right when the mind is least capable of producing them. Then guilt settles in, those dreadful what-I-could-have-done-differently shroud every thought, like a weed, and the righteous demand for attention from loved ones trips over their own, selfish, reasons. Self-inflicted isolation follows, at the worst possible time. Adrift, we are suddenly reminded of how whimsical Nature can be with our puny little lives: “The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing.” (p. 156).Chaos is disappointingly simple. Definitive. It leaves ink imprints, unlike a draft: “In writing you can always change the ending or delete a chapter that isn’t working. Life is uncooperative, impartial, incontestable. (p. 206)”. It can become worse with a dose of self-deceit that shields you from the truth of the inevitable problems ahead. But then that self-deceit unravels, and the next step is, simultaneously, a step towards something darker and better.This is why the review must end with her words, not mine, because they are powerful, lovely, brave, fragile and worthy of your attention: “What else? What next? As everything else has fallen apart, what has stayed intact is something I always had, the thing that made me a writer: curiosity. Hope.” (p. 205).

⭐the author lays herself bare by taking responsibility early on for for her life and the consequences of her actions. Paraphrasing – she leads into the contact with the former lover by saying… she was about to do something terrible that leads to a series of POOR LIFE CHOICES the stack on top of each other and block the sun.INSIGHTFUL of human nature and relationships. I found this book EPIC in terms of its providing me a life changing insight – so negative reviewers there is at least one person in the world who got a new perspective on her own narcissism and a chance to reset on a future of possibility with her spouse – so it made a difference to this one.SURPRISING if i had read about the author i never would have bought this book. I am many things she is not – like I object to ‘feminism’ as someone doing me a favor. and the New Yorker? yikes – way off my GOP reading list but I found her story so human and intimate but not at all judge-y. I seriously don’t know how this got in my library – but sort of like a little miracle because i found her story from her completely different social and political leanings so completely compelling and told in a way that equalizes us all. her criticism of the al anon meeting is not a criticism of them or the program… it is her showing us her own vulnerability and therefore giving us a chance to look at our own similar faults.I never read those book club questions after the book but I did this time – I am not sure the questions even get the depth available in this book. but they are still pretty good.I also never have to look up words but looked up two in this book – and found the usage appropriate and not pretentious – something that “new yorker magazine” screams to me. the use of language just carried me along – i read this in two sittings – after finishing reading a book with my teenager and being in the mood for more fiction – which i thought this was – again – no idea how it got on my reading list – maybe i was drunk when i bought it. but i found it absolutely life changing.

⭐I didn’t enjoy this; the author was so angry and seemed so confused ( aren’t we all). But she never seems to grow up. Sometimes people just makes their own life too complicated.I hope the author figures life out.

⭐The memoir THE RULES DO NOT APPLY is written by a talented and powerful writer, Ariel Levy, who has a lot to say and she serves up what most of us would perhaps keep quietly within the confines of a therapist’s office. This combination is what makes an excellent memoir. The author shares truly intimate details about her relationships, the horror of delivering her baby in the most unusual circumstances, who did sadly did not live, and her phenomenal writing career, while she is still a young woman.​I commend Levy for not holding back. I am in awe of her resilience. I imagine that this book is one way that she could cope with the gravity of some of the things that she went through and to find a way out of the darkness.There were many lines in the book that made me cringe, not in a judgmental way, that made me wince along with her, and that made me laugh ridiculously hard. One when Levy is talking to a friend about the pros and cons of having kids. Her friend is clearly on the side of ‘it’s a bad thing’ while Levy is trying to convince herself that it is a good thing. Levy says something to the effect of how she thinks it would be cool to ‘make something of your own.’ To which the friend replies: “It’s not a gingerbread man. It changes your entire life.” I had to go back to the passage a few times to re-read it. And laugh aloud.Levy uses humor to lift us up while taking us to the what surely is among the lowest depths of human misery. She takes us so close to her edge and finds a way to bring herself back and the reader right alongside her. This book is not for the faint of heart, but it can show you that getting back on the horse, perhaps not on every pony in the stable, allows you to move on to greener pastures.

⭐I loved this book. It feels strange to love a story that is ultimately so sad, but I always enjoyed her Cassandra newspaper column so knew I would enjoy the novel.Careers, sexuality, relationships, joy, love, disappointment… the whole sphere of the human condition is covered in a way, and with people, that hasn’t been told before. Ariel is so so honest, warts and all, even if that makes her unlikeable- and thank god women are starting to realise we don’t have to be likeable.An interesting part of her life. I recommend.

⭐I found how Ariel writes so openly about her trauma and loss heartbreaking and she makes you understand a bit more how this would feel. I did find however that a lot of the book started a story but didn’t go deep enough into it, I wanted more detail in parts but felt it just ended abruptly. I liked some parts of the book but not all so I wouldn’t recommend it to a friend.

⭐This is spectacular. So insightful and brutally honest, I couldn’t put it down. I’ve since been pestering everyone I know to read it.

⭐This is a book like nothing else I have ever read. Absolutely stunning, I cannot recommend it enough.

⭐Pretty well written but so, so depressing.

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