This must go up front, even if it is a sort of spoiler. To know a memoir is powerful is to fear the tidy ending. Even if we don't know at the end of the story what's going to happen next exactly, there's a comforting author bio suggesting our writer has gotten her shit together so we aren't left with the fear that this is all there is and it might not actually be getting better. But the events herein are too fresh — Levy's ending takes place in 2014 or 2015 — thus we have no such reassurance.
But that's not why I adored this book. I don't take pleasure from other people's pains, I don't even particularly enjoy a good celebrity divorce. But I do love a good story, especially one that's well told. The Rules Do Not Apply is both.
Levy has been a staff writer with The New Yorker since 2008, and before that with New York Magazine. Thanks to her effortless writing style, this book conquers life's toughest subjects — from death, divorce, and affairs of the heart — in a volume that can be read in a single sitting.
Her career is also a huge part of this memoir. And while that can be clunky — think Sarah Silverman's never ending office tales from Bedwetter — or distractingly extraordinary — think a full year of travel a la Eat Pray Love — here Levy drops in her experiences in ways that fascinate and serve to move the story forward.
She shares her great love — There is nothing I love more than traveling to a place where I know nobody, and where everything will be a surprise, and then writing about it. It’s like having a new lover—even the parts you aren’t crazy about have the crackling fascination of the unfamiliar.
And also tells us stories about the people she meets along the way — Ephron was opposed to whining. She told me she did not believe in it. “I don’t mean that you can’t sit at home and feel sorry for yourself—briefly,” she said one afternoon… “But then I think you have to just start typing and do the next thing.” She must have known she was dying when she said that.
But these are threads in the tapestry of her own story, which also includes beautiful, personality-defining details about her family, friends, and lovers.
And while I agree with her that "[w]omen of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism…" If anything, her story shows us that in the end, the rules do apply. She writes, "[e]ven if you write nonfiction, you still control how the story unfolds." But also, "Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled."
And it is that last statement that drives the engine of this book, making it something I couldn't put down, precisely because life is something that no one controls.
Of course, this might simply be a case of intention versus perception, which I know as an author myself. Perhaps Levy thought that by doing all the things — successful career, marriage, kid — she would be guaranteed a good life. The only rule I know for sure is that no one gets out alive. No matter either way, the title served to get my attention and the book more than held it.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 2, 2017.