I had a very difficult time relating to the author...

As a fan of fiction more than any other kind of reading, it is alway hard for me to "grade" an autobiography. It isn't up to me to judge another's life or path, so I feel I am invading a bit when it is time to review. Yet this book called to me from NetGalley as one I might like to read and review.

I have to admit it kept my interest. Many reviewers say the author's emotions are raw in this memoir. That may be so. I just found them honest and refreshing. As a fertile-Myrtle, who had, as most of my generation, my children in my early twenties, I never heard that egg-timer to get pregnant or forget it. I thought, "Wouldn't it be nice to have another?" and boom I was pregnant. So the despair of the author seems another reality I've not been close to. In that case, I think it right to go into the depth with her and see what her reality has been. Would my story of a baby every couple years and only at home ever be as interesting to her generation? So I find her lucky to have experienced so many things I never got to see. That she had the freedom to explore her sexuality after being an adult, who got to see the world I may never see, isn't sad. Those were the parts of the story I truly enjoyed.

But I don't want to demean or in any way put down her path and especially not the sad parts of it. That need to reproduce is very strong in many of us and to have that turn out so badly hurts my soul for her.

That is why I like to read autobiographies. I can lead many lives that way. I can see how things might have been had I made other choices or had nature played nasty tricks on my life. I think it helps to develop empathy to read another's story. And this may be one you might like. Give it a try.

“My competent self – so strong, since childhood, so perspicacious, always looking for opportunities, adventures, glory, always trying to protect me from defeat – had been crushed. The wide-open blue forever had spoken: You control nothing.” Ariel Levy’s memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply was a gut wrenching read that took my breath away and inspired me at the same time. Ariel is an adventure seeking writer who has traveled the globe for her stories, and is currently working for The New Yorker. She has interviewed everyone from the South African runner Caster Semenya to the former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. She seemed to have it all -- a wonderful marriage, a successful career, financial security and a baby on the way. She says “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 a very short span of time, she suffered tremendous loss and her family as she knew it was gone. Ariel writes with such rawness and candor that it is impossible to not be moved. While hers is a story of unfathomable loss, it is also a story of inspiration. The fact that she could get up out of bed and put one foot in front of the other after all she had experienced and go back out into the world is amazing to me. I will not reveal any spoilers here but there is a scene from the book where she takes a picture with her phone and that passage still haunts me. This book is an examination of life, our choices and their consequences, of grief, forgiveness and redemption. It is also an incredible testament to the resiliency of Levy’s spirit and her drive.

4 out of 5 stars. Thank you so much to Netgalley and Random House for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for my honest review.

Wow! This is the best memoir I've read in years. I marvel at Ariel Levy's way of packing life, love, death, happiness, unhappiness, grief and joy into her spare and authentic writing. This book really connected with me, and I can't wait to share it with my nonfiction writing students. Thank you for letting me read Ariel Levy's dazzler of a memoir!

A well-written but grueling account of the end of a relationship, and a miscarriage at 19 weeks. Levy's writing reminds me somewhat of Cheryl Strayed's; an emotionally wounded young woman in search of a solid handhold in this unpredictable world.

Unfortunately this was a DNF even though it was well written the style was hard for me. It felt all over the place, the story fell flat for me I couldn't connect with it

I have enjoyed many of the Levy's pieces in The New Yorker so was eager to read her memoir which really wasn't what I expected at all. Her parents instilled in her the confidence to try things and believe she could be whatever she wanted to be. She wrote about her circuitous journey from there, to learning that everybody doesn't get everything, concluding that Mother Nature is free to do whatever she chooses. It was a coming of age story of sorts, very real, raw and achingly lonely at times, beautifully written.

Could not get into this at all. Kept losing track of the story and characters. Forced myself to read half but stopped at that point.

I was given this book by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Wonderful book and hard to put down, I would recommend this to friends!

I enjoyed this book but I'm not sure of the mass appeal that it may have for general audiences. I struggled with Ariel as she went through so many problems and looking at her life from the outside and at my age, I could almost know what was happening but at her age, I know I would have done the same thing.

What I most appreciated is that she simply wrote her story. She didn't focus on any one aspect as far as being a lesbian, wife of an alcoholic, etc. She was all those things and that's what makes up our lives, isn't it.

This will be a bestseller among the right crowd but it is not for those looking for enlightenment or answers to life's questions - it's about life and how we all just have to get through it.

I really couldn't get into this book. I wouldn't buy it for my library but, since I couldn't get into it, I'd have to ask someone else to weigh in to the worthiness of being added to the collection.

Thank you to both the publisher as well as to Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to review this book for an honest review. Although sad, this was a wonderfully written autobiography by Ariel Levy. The start of the book - where the author states a friend asks how her son is, and she replies, "he's dead". Then the friend asks how the marriage and house were, and she replies, "the marriage is over and I have moved out of the house - caught my attention and led me on an interesting, but sad biography of this author who seemed to have everything in life, only to lose it all in one fell swoop. Definitely a tear-jerker, and you feel you can relate to aspects of the book (I.e., alcoholism in the family, loss of life in the family, etc.). Again, wonderful written, and truly makes you think about what is important to you in life.

Choosing to Be: on Ariel Levy’s ‘The Rules Do Not Apply’

Ariel Levy excavates loss. A miscarried son. Marriage. Home. Parents. She claims, “Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It is also a symptom of narcissism.” This memoir achieves a perfect balance between personal and universal concerns, neatly sidestepping any slide toward narcissism. Grief has bestowed upon the author immense gifts for empathy.

Yearning for adventure, Levy accepts an assignment to Mongolia, where she suffers a miscarriage. In recovery, she begins writing about her own life as a means to heal. She ranges back to examine her privileged childhood, then tiptoes forward through a series of professional and romantic milestones to reach age 38, a pivotal evening when she miscarries in a drab room at the Blue Sky Hotel in Ulaanbaatar, “among the most polluted capital cities in the world, as well as the coldest.”

Ms. Levy, (a staff writer for The New Yorker) writes with an emotionally raw and lyrical style that will appeal to fans of Cheryl Strayed, Mary Karr, Alexandra Fuller. “When I was fourteen, I had a shaggy sixteen-year-old boyfriend named Josh with whom I felt a desperate, precarious intimacy. Both of our homes were like embassies of the 1960s in the manicured foreign terrain of Reagan-era suburbia.”

Themes include: coming of age; non-traditional marriage to her beloved, Lucy; Lucy’s struggles with alcoholism; (in)fidelity; pregnancy; loss; choices; divorce; becoming a journalist. Levy invites the reader to contemplate possibility in a world where previous cultural rules no longer apply, where fate (or nature) will eternally bestow unpredictable tragedy.

The memoir ends abruptly, like life itself, hinting that there may be a sequel involving travel, love, more new rules for a brave new life. Highly recommended.

Thank You to Random House Publishing Group for providing me with an advanced copy of Ariel Levy's memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, in exchange for an honest review.

PLOT- In her memoir, The Rules Do Not Apply, journalist Ariel Levy explores love and loss, in her relationships, career, and path to motherhood. She learns the hard truth that life is a series of trade-offs and that the conventional concept of "having it all," is a myth.

LIKE- I vividly remember the final lecture of a Western Civilization class that I took at Pasadena City College, when I was in my early-twenties: The male professor, an self-proclaimed feminist, who would later be caught in several scandals and removed from his position, gave a piece of advice, that in way I've forgotten, was tenuously related to the lecture; he said that time is limited and that fertility did not last forever. He was speaking primarily to the females in the class, urging us, as we focused on our education and careers, to consider that the time frame for fertility is limited. I'm not quite sure what prompted this advice, but I remember the urgency in his tone. He was middle-aged, and in hind-sight, I'm guessing a recent personal predicament influenced his words. I've never wanted children, but that advice has stayed with me, especially as I near forty, still not wanting children, but realizing that the window of opportunity may already be shut. This idea is at the forefront of Levy's memoir.

Levy's road to motherhood is not clear. She is in an unstable marriage with Lucy, an older woman, who is an alcoholic. As Levy tries to strengthen her marriage, she is tempted through reconnecting with former lovers. Her writing career has always been important, and one that sends her on assignments around the world. Lucy's alcoholism isn't the only instability, as Lucy has sunk their savings into starting a solar panel company. Levy is in her late-thirties when she finally decides that she wants to be a mother, and they have a close friend who is happy to not only donate sperm, but to help out financially, and be another adult figure in their child's life. Levy easily becomes pregnant, and her life seems to be heading towards stability and happiness, until tragedy strikes. Levy delivers her child prematurely, alone in a hotel room, while on assignment in Mongolia. The baby is born alive, but dies about fifteen minutes later, as Levy is rushed to the hospital. It's crushing, even more so that she had minutes where she held her living child.

The title, The Rules Do Not Apply, are about all of the conventional things that as a child (or even into adulthood), you expect will happen. You expect to graduate from college and land a great job. You expect to fall in love and have a family. You expect that your parents will live long enough to see those grandchildren. You expect that hard work and being a good person should grant these rewards. However, as Levy points out, this has not been the case for her, and it has not been the case for many of her friends. Life simply does not work like that for most people. Conventionality is a myth.

Levy's thoughts are poignant and her personal story is compelling. She has a knack for phrasing and writes beautifully. She weaves her story with the stories of people that she profiles in her reporting, making her memoir global and expansive. I can't imagine any reader would be left unaffected by this emotional and thought provoking memoir.

DISLIKE- Nothing. The Rules Do Not Apply is powerful and riveting.

RECOMMEND- Yes! The Rules Do Not Apply is a must-read memoir. I'm certain that Levy's story will be a bestseller and generate a lot of buzz. Read it and be part of the conversation!

“For the first time I can remember, I cannot locate my competent self- one more missing person.”

Ariel Levy tells us people told her all her life she was too much, but what does that mean? And why is a woman ever too much? I was surprised by how much I enjoyed spending time with her thoughts, past, grief, mistakes. We can find common ground in any life, regardless of how they differ from our own, maybe if we did that more often we’d be a hell of a lot more accepting of others. What struck me the hardest was the pain I felt reading about Caster Semenya, because Levy beautifully expressed how devastating it is to be a human being whose most intimate parts are ‘suspect’. For just that moment, I sunk into the shock of such a emotional ‘stoning’, and cannot imagine the humiliation of such accusations made public worldwide on top of all that horror. Levy’s writing in that chapter was visceral for me, I thought about it for days. Writing that can have such an effect on you, that can pull you out of your skin and into another’s is the gifted sort. There was so much to think about, to relate to, for any of us- this gutted me. “But throughout her childhood, her gender had been the subject of suspicion and curiosity wherever she went. ‘It looks like a boy’- that’s the right words,” Sako told me. “They used to say, ‘It looks like a boy.’ The very ideal, the IT, made me sick. Levy’s thoughts on the horrible incident exposes so much about the world and gender.

There was more that made me ache. Life can be beautiful, blessed but you never know what can go wrong, or worse- how you can do such stupid, human things that bring everything you built down around your ears. We hurt those we love, we lie, we get nostalgic or hungry and lose ourselves in a moment of greed and blow it all. We don’t know what to do with our grief, so we leave it alone, poking at it, letting it fester until it consumes us. Do we carry our families fears, their relationship poison in our DNA? Is that it? Do we pass down the resentment brewing in our bitter hearts to our children, and their children and so on and so forth?

Even Levy’s own parents had a relationship different from the norm. Love is not a box we all live in, well defined and perfectly contained. Just when we have it, so many of us betray our lovers, or ourselves. Why? Why do we sometimes think we must have more? Is it something missing in ourselves? Just when she has everything, she suffers a devastating loss. In our world we’re pushed to brush ourselves off and get over it. (Doesn’t matter if it’s a divorce, a death, a miscarriage) in this vast world you are not the first to suffer and therefore you should move along, perk up, try again. You can just FIX all of it! But life isn’t that pliable. We can’t bring back what’s been lost. Blindness in love is universal. Needing someone there who is absent when we break is akin to falling into a black-hole. It’s so hard to be the rock for yourself when you need nurturing.

This memoir is intimate, tender, beautiful. Your gender doesn’t really matter, nor whether you are in a straight or gay marriage. The struggles are there for all of us, aren’t they? The joy as much as the disappointments. You may be living a grand life and just one event can alter everything you thought was real and true. None of us are safe from nature, nor others actions or worse- our own choices. There is beauty in that, and horror too. Maybe the horrible things that happen to us, that we do to ourselves and each other have a lesson, maybe it’s all just chaos and chance but it’s the price we pay for being living flesh in this world. Maybe we should stand strong and not rely on another but that isn’t a guarantee from pain either. Either way, Levy’s memoir tells us all we aren’t alone in grief, loss.

Publication Date: March 14, 2017

Random House

Many thanks to Random House for allowing me to read an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is easily one of the best books I've read in the past year, and I'll be recommending and gifting it to all of my friends. Ms. Levy has an amazing ability to perfectly convey the raw and intense emotions accompanying grief. She doesn't hold back, and the result is an incredible journey through a season of trials and ultimately a resolution with life as it is. Put this book on your short list - you won't be disappointed.

I couldn't stop reading. I didn't always like the author's tone, or agree with her opinions, but I HAD to know what she was going to say next. At a certain point, there is a gut punch of a scene that was really hard to read and made me cry with frustration and empathy...
I think the finest examples of writing are in those books which evoke the raw, visceral feelings so many of us can't put into words, and for that, I thank Ms. Levy for writing and applaud her skill.