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The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography…
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The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography (2018 original; edició 2018)

de Deborah Levy (Autor)

MembresRessenyesPopularitatValoració mitjanaMencions
4741951,697 (3.96)16
"What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson. The Cost of Living is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed novels"--Dust jacket.… (més)
Membre:Diane2a.m.
Títol:The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography
Autors:Deborah Levy (Autor)
Informació:Bloomsbury Publishing (2018), 144 pages
Col·leccions:La teva biblioteca, Llegint actualment
Valoració:
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Informació de l'obra

The Cost of Living de Deborah Levy (2018)

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    Kudos de Rachel Cusk (JuliaMaria)
    JuliaMaria: Leben einer Schriftstellerin mit Kindern nach einer Scheidung.
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    I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death de Maggie O'Farrell (JuliaMaria)
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» Mira també 16 mencions

Es mostren 1-5 de 19 (següent | mostra-les totes)
My 2 star rating is because I'm not sure what I think of this sequel to 'Things I Don't Want to Know'. I found the book fairly slight, uneven, lacking in shape - in spine, and without the kind of amused reflection of the preceding book in this autobiography. Maybe there is more to be found in a second reading but I probably won't read it again. I wanted more insight and challenge from a book with such a great title. Nevertheless, I consumed the book with interest and a degree of expectation. What probably killed it for me was the superficiality of last line '...is made from the cost of living and is made with digital ink.' Instead of drawing threads together, this last line seemed like failure of nerve. I expected more from Deborah Levy because she has shown she is capable of more than dull passivity. Perhaps when I've thought more about it... ( )
  simonpockley | Feb 25, 2024 |
A Room of Her Own
Review of the Hamish Hamilton hardcover edition (August 21, 2018) of the Bloomsbury Publishing hardcover original (July 10, 2018), with reference to the Hamish Hamilton Kindle eBook.

I had energy because I had no choice but to have energy. I had to write to support my children and I had to do all the heavy lifting. Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.
...
Proust had reached for this same thought and came up with something that better suited this phase in my life: Ideas come to us as the successors to griefs, and griefs, at the moment when they change into ideas, lose some part of their power to injure the heart.
...
The writing life is mostly about stamina. To get to the finishing line requires the writing to become more interesting than everyday life, and a log fire, like everyday life, is never boring.
...
In that case, I wasn’t winterized after all. I identified with Camus, who declared he had an invincible summer inside him, even in winter.
...
This had been my theme in Things I Don’t Want to Know, in which I speculated that the things we don’t want to know are the things that are known to us anyway, but we do not wish to look at them too closely. Freud described this wish to unknow what we know as motivated forgetting.
...
All writing is about looking and listening and paying attention to the world.
...
Life is only worth living because we hope it will get better and we’ll all get home safely.
...
And then I read that he wrote Hamlet in the year his father died. The line that means the most to me in the entire play is Hamlet’s reply when asked what it is he is reading. Words, words, words. I think he is trying to say that he is inconsolable. Words can cover up everything that matters.
...
Marguerite Duras suggested in a reverie that came to her from the calm of her final house, a home she had made to please herself, that ‘writing comes like the wind’. It’s naked, it’s made of ink, it’s the thing written, and it passes like nothing else passes in life, nothing more, except life itself. The writing you are reading now is made from the cost of living and it is made with digital ink.


The Cost of Living carries on with Deborah Levy's memoirs as the follow-up to the 1st volume Things I Don't Want to Know (2013). A further follow-up is the 3rd volume Real Estate (2020), currently the last in the series. Levy describes them as "living autobiographies," as they are "hopefully not being written at the end, with hindsight, but in the storm of life."

The current book looks back on a time after Levy's divorce, when she had to support 2 children with her writing. The situation at home was too distracting, so she managed to obtain the use of a friend's garden shed as "a room of her own" in which to write. During this time she also had to deal with the death of her mother. The book continues with her various musings about "why she writes". Most of my favourite quotes are excerpted above in the introduction.

As mentioned previously, I especially enjoy books about books and writing, so Levy's memoirs are particularly enjoyable for me. I look forward to completing the current trilogy, but I hope that further memoirs may yet follow.

Trivia and Link
Deborah Levy's "living autobiographies" are written in reaction to George Orwell's Why I Write (1946). ( )
  alanteder | Oct 20, 2023 |
Is there anything better than reading the right book at the right time?

"If we don't have names, who are we?" ( )
  cbwalsh | Sep 13, 2023 |
while looking at other reviews of this book i just learned that this book is actually the 2nd in Deborah Levy's autobiographies.. i guess "a working autobiography" should of gave that away, but i didn't think like that, but now i'm excited to read more! i love Deborah Levy and her essays are so beautifully written. they're so personal and reflective and real and just beautiful. her writing style is the best. so much to reflect on in association to moving on and moving forward and letting go of our past lives. i love the metaphor and maybe it was intentional maybe it wasn't or maybe it just turned into a metaphor with her electric bike and how she ended up taking out a lot of rage from her old on this new bike. going forward - keep moving forward. and if she were to crash her bike ever the crash of her marriage was bad enough that any bike crash would be minor in comparison. just a lovely read ( )
  Ellen-Simon | Mar 1, 2023 |
There is just something about Levy's writing absolutely adore. I don't know if I enjoyed this as much as Real Estate but the two books are so different. This one kicks off right after Levy's divorce so it felt like a lot more was happening and there was more movement. I listened to this on audio and read Real Estate on paper, so that may be the difference as well. I didn't feel that the "Cost of Living" theme was tied together completely in this. But the writing is so lovely. And Levy's life is both relatable and aspirational. She talks about her divorce, about the death of her mother, about falling in love with an electric bike, turning a flat into a home, moving into her writing shed, etc, etc. After reading Real Estate, I called out just how clear and crisp the writing is, usually a sign of incredible editing and intention. And, with this book, I was again struck with how intentional Levy is with language. I'm pretty sure she does it in Real Estate as well, but in The Cost of Living, she doesn't name men. They are "my male best friend," "the father of my children," "the man who cried at a funeral." It is such a funny and small but meaningful thing to do. I love it. ( )
  tanyaferrell | Dec 23, 2022 |
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Stevenson, JulietNarradorautor secundarialgunes edicionsconfirmat

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"What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage? This vibrant memoir, a portrait of contemporary womanhood in flux, is an urgent quest to find an unwritten major female character who can exist more easily in the world. Levy considers what it means to live with meaning, value, and pleasure, to seize the ultimate freedom of writing our own lives, and reflects on the work of such artists and thinkers as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Marguerite Duras, David Lynch, and Emily Dickinson. The Cost of Living is crucial testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed novels"--Dust jacket.

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