The Cost of Living by Deobrah Levy

The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
UK Publication: 2018
Reviewed by: Book Worm
Rating: [★★★]

This ARC was provided by Penguin Books UK (via NetGalley) in exchange for an honest review.

Short and sweet

Synopsis from Goodreads: A searching examination of all the dimensions of love, marriage, mourning, and kinship from two-time Booker Prize finalist Deborah Levy.

To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children has been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman.

The Cost of Living explores the subtle erasure of women’s names, spaces, and stories in the modern everyday. In this “living autobiography” infused with warmth and humor, Deborah Levy critiques the roles that society assigns to us, and reflects on the politics of breaking with the usual gendered rituals. What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?

Levy draws on her own experience of attempting to live with pleasure, value, and meaning–the making of a new kind of family home, the challenges of her mother’s death–and those of women she meets in everyday life, from a young female traveler reading in a bar who suppresses her own words while she deflects an older man’s advances, to a particularly brilliant student, to a kindly and ruthless octogenarian bookseller who offers the author a place to write at a difficult time in her life. The Cost of Living is urgent, essential reading, a crystalline manifesto for turbulent times.

My Thoughts: At 144 pages this was a breeze to read through, the narrative feels as if Levy is speaking directly to you over a nice hot drink in a cosy café. This book totally embodies women together chatting, setting the world to rights and speculating about how things got to this point.

Who would like this? I would recommend this to fans of Levy’s writing and to anyone who wants an honest view of the world from a female perspective that feels like a chat with a friend.

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