The Cost of Living

The Cost of Living

Living Autobiography 2

Summary

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy.

A Guardian Best Book of the 21st Century

'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip. We try to hold it together. And then we realize that we don't want to hold it together...'

Picking up where Things I Don't Want to Know left off, this short, exhilarating memoir shows a writer in radical flux, facing separation and bereavement, and emerging renewed from the ashes of a former life. Faced with the restrictions of conventional living, she dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape. Writing as brilliantly as ever about mothers and daughters, about social pressures and the female experience, Deborah Levy confronts a world not designed to accommodate difficult women and ultimately remakes herself in her own image.

Reviews

  • Deborah Levy is a most generous writer. What is wonderful about this short, sensual, embattled memoir is that it is not only about the painful landmarks in her life - the end of a marriage , the death of a mother - it is about what it is to be alive. I can't think of any other writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about the liminal, the domestic, the non-event, and what it is to be a woman... This is a little book about a big subject. It is about how to find a new way of living
    Observer

About the author

Deborah Levy

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed 'living autobiography' trilogy: Things I Don't Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
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