The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy
The Cost of Living, Deborah Levy
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The Cost of Living
A Working Autobiography

Author: Deborah Levy

Narrator: Henrietta Meire

Unabridged: 2 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/11/2018


Synopsis

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.

About Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy writes fiction, plays, and poetry. Her work has been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company, broadcast on the BBC, and widely translated. The author of highly praised novels, including The Man Who Saw Everything (longlisted for the Booker Prize), Hot Milk and Swimming Home (both Man Booker Prize finalists), The Unloved, and Billy and Girl, the acclaimed story collection Black Vodka, and two parts of her working autobiography, Things I Don't Want to Know and The Cost of Living, she lives in London. Levy is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Literature.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Ilse on October 20, 2024

Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs. Even if I thought the first part of Deborah Levy’s ‘Working Autobiography’ trilogy not particularly captivating, these slim volumes in bright blue, yellow and red are so alluringly designed I feel irresistibly dra......more

Goodreads review by Adam on December 22, 2019

Even stronger than the excellent Things I Don't Want to Know, Levy is firing on all cylinders in this short memoir segment, which details a year of change after a divorce, and examines instances of erasure of women in modern society. The scenes are memorable, poignant, and often hilarious (a run ove......more

Goodreads review by Trish on September 29, 2018

Deborah Levy is a woman for our times. She is up to her neck in this moment, stewing like a teabag. One can imagine calming a stressed constituent by sitting her down and handing her a cup…a copy of Levy’s slim new book, a working autobiography, a quiet, private, assessing look at a life which tries......more

Goodreads review by Dannii on January 13, 2021

Towards the end of last year I picked up a collection of essays by Deborah Levy, entitled Things I Don't Want to Know. These essays were written as a feminist response to George Orwell's Why I Write, which I was reading at the time. I adored Orwell's writing but there was something about Levy's essa......more

Goodreads review by Ulysse on September 23, 2023

The Cost of Living is the second part of a three-volume memoir written by the British author Deborah Levy. I read the first part, Things I Don’t Want to Know, last week and loved it so much I immediately followed it up with this one. But that was last week. You see, my problem is that I have a memor......more