Rules Do Not Apply (Levy)

The Rules Do Not Apply 
Ariel Levy, 2017
Random House
224 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780812996937


Summary
A gorgeous memoir about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinvention—for 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 rules—about 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 can’t 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 changed—and of what is eternal. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—October 17, 1974
• Raised—Larchmont, New York, USA
• Education—B.A., Wesleyan University
• Currently—lives in New York, New York


Ariel Levy is an American staff writer at The New Yorker magazine and the author of the books The Rules do Not Apply (2017) and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture (2005). Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, New Yorker, Vogue, Slate, and New York Times. Levy was named one of the "Forty Under 40" most influential out individuals in the June/July 2009 issue of The Advocate.

Early life and education
Levy was raised in Larchmont, New York, and says she knew from early on that she wanted to become a writer

I always wanted to be a writer, for as long as I can remember. I’ve kept a journal since at least the third grade—writing has always been my method for making sense of the world and my experience. Also, my dad is a writer so it seemed sort of natural.

She graduated from Wesleyan University in 1996 and claims that her experiences at the university, which had "coed showers, on principle," influenced her views regarding modern sexuality. After graduating, she was briefly employed by Planned Parenthood, but claims that she was fired because she is "an extremely poor typist." Not long after, she was hired by New York magazine.

Levy spent 12 years at New York magazine where, as a contributing editor, she wrote about John Waters, Stanley Bosworth, Donatella Versace, the writer George W. S. Trow, the feminist Andrea Dworkin, and the artists Ryan McGinley and Dash Snow.

In 2008, she moved to The New Yorker, becoming staff writer and publishing profiles of Cindy McCain, Silvio Berlusconi, Caster Semenya and Callista Gingrich. Levy has explored issues surrounding American drug use, gender roles, lesbian culture, and the popularity of U.S. pop culture staples such as Sex and the City. Some of these articles allude to Levy's personal thoughts on the status of modern feminism.

Culture critic
Levy criticized the pornographic video series Girls Gone Wild after she followed its camera crew for three days, interviewed both the makers of the series and the women who appeared on the videos, and commented on the series' concept and the debauchery she was witnessing. Many of the young women Levy spoke with believed that bawdy and liberated were synonymous.

Levy's experiences amid Girls Gone Wild appear again in Female Chauvinist Pigs, in which she attempts to explain "why young women today are embracing raunchy aspects of our culture that would likely have caused their feminist foremothers to vomit."

In today's culture, Levy writes, the idea of a woman participating in a wet T-shirt contest or being comfortable watching explicit pornography has become a symbol of strength; she says that she was surprised at how many people, both men and women, working for programs such as Girls Gone Wild told her that this new "raunch" culture marked not the downfall of feminism but its triumph, but Levy is unconvinced.

Levy's work is anthologized in The Best American Essays of 2008, New York Stories, and 30 Ways of Looking at Hillary.

Personal life
In 2013 she wrote about losing her unborn baby at 19 weeks while traveling alone in Mongolia, which became the basis for her 2017 memoir Rules Do Not Apply. (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retieved 3/1/2017.)

Book Reviews
[A] dark and absorbing memoir.… Though some of the lessons learned in this memorable story are painful, Levy ultimately finds redemption in her ability to glimpse the light beyond the darkness, and to gain a deepening gratitude for friends, family, and her profession.
Publishers Weekly


With dignity and grace, this former golden girl eloquently acknowledges how the fact that "everybody doesn’t get everything"” in life is "as natural and unavoidable as mortality." Unflinchingly candid and occasionally heartbreaking.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, please use our LitLovers taking points to start a discussion for The Rules Do Not Apply…then take off on your own:

1. Ariel Levy's memoir begins with this statement: "For the first time I can remember, I cannot locate my competent self." She feels disoriented and confused. Have you ever felt this way, even without the devastating loss Levy has experienced?

2. Levy comes to see herself as the cause of her own collapse: "I knew, as surely as I now knew that I wanted a child, that this change in fortune was my fault," she writes. What do you think? What realization does she eventually come to?

3. How do you see Ariel Levy? Is she too hard on herself? She has led a particularly comfortable existence, one my say a life of privilege. Do you think in some way that comfort shielded her from experiences that the majority of people struggle with and perhaps left her less able to cope with life's vicissitudes?

4. Consider your own life: which circumstances have been, or are, outside of your control? Which ones have been, or are, within your purview? How much control do we have over our lives?

5. Talk about Levy's marriage, her infidelity, and her spouse's alcoholism.

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution.)

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