Welcome to Litsy!

I can‘t review this objectively at all because I just felt it all subjectively, although I‘m not going/have not been through loss of a parent, divorce, finding my own way as a single parent etc. I just felt it. Love her writing.

Thank you, @squirrelbrain for the early birthday present. 😘😘😘

It's a bit like the blue/brown dress that made the rounds a few years ago, it's not exactly yellow, but it's not orange either. Anyway it's a very welcome addition to the #YellowNFShelf.

Thank you, Helen!

#BookMail

Another winner from Levy.

I particularly enjoyed the parts about having your own writing space and the importance of someone respecting that. She borrowed a shed from a friend to write and she would stop anyone trying to disturb her.

I also found it interesting how she focuses on male description of women, they are either wife or mother, never their first name. And also how women is expected to take up less space.

Second of Deborah Levy's series of memoirs is an astonishing piece of writing. It portrays the life of a woman in her 50s who has to come to terms with a divorce after investing her life in the marriage, but then having to manage the death of her mother. With beautifully crafted expression of her feelings as she wonders at her place in the world it also contains both amusing and poignant individual scenes. Makes me want to revisit her novels.

Such an honest examination of the time after a breakup.

A remarkable listen…DL shares stories of her life, and her observations, with themes of politics, womanhood, motherhood, and writing, weaved in. Evocative, contains some beautiful passages and the stories about her mother are the most moving. I enjoyed it.

I‘m now even more of a Deborah Levy fangirl than I was before! I just LOVE her writing. There‘s something both straightforward and also dream-like about the way she expresses the simplest action or deepest felt emotion.

This slim memoir, written as part of a project/series of ‘working autobiographies‘, tackles a time in her life when she divorced, and also her mother died soon after.....

Continued in comments....⬇️

#currentlisten 🎧💕📚
Just realized this is a part two of a memoir..... so far it doesn‘t seem to matter.... 🤷‍♀️
Loving Deborah Levy‘s writing....

I inhaled this audio book. So excited to have found this author. I can't wait to read her other work. Autobiography. Highly recommend. 4.5 🌟

Deborah Levy's works have lingered on the fringes of my TBR list for quite some time now. The other day, I decided to read a few lines and was engaged immediately. Deborah Levy is an indelible writer who touches on universal themes of our many selves and living with purpose in this memoir. I will be reading more of Deborah Levy and soon.

#7days7covers #covercrush

Everyone join in 💛

#MonthofMemoirs

https://wellreadneck.wordpress.com/2019/07/26/the-cost-of-living-deborah-levy/

I picked up this memoir after seeing it on Barack Obama‘s best books of 2018 list.

It purports to be about Levy‘s adjustments after her divorce and her mother passed. But, it feels more about being a woman in the Western world. Her writing is absolutely gorgeous!!

This is an excellent book and one that I will definitely reread. A first person examination of the author‘s life, resulting in a feminist manifesto of sorts. After my initial quick read (it‘s only 134 pages), it deserves a deeper examination. #pageonebooks

This short memoir looks at two particularly trying times in her life - her divorce and the death of her mother shortly thereafter. She also examines women‘s roles in society and questions why women so easily forgo their own ambitions, comfort, and safety for the sake of maintaining a home for a spouse and children. Very meditative and insightful. #Hoopla

“We are immensely vulnerable and immensely powerful. These states coexist.” -Deborah Levy, speaking at #VWF2018

I have become a night wanderer without moving from my writing chair. The night is softer than the day, quieter, sadder, calmer, the sound of wind tapping windows, the hissing of pipes, the entropy that makes floorboards creak, the ghostly night bus that comes and goes—and always in cities, a far-off distant sound that resembles the sea, yet is just life, more life.

Writing a novel requires many hours of sitting still, as if on a long-haul flight, final destination unknown, but a route of sorts mapped out.

Levy documents her passage into a new phase of life at 50, post-marriage, finding space and time to write while caring for her teenaged daughters and fixing the plumbing. Vibrant, clear, urgent and inventive—her prose is a delight. 💕

This afternoon I had an argument with my copy editor about commas. She is keen to insert more commas into my text for easy reading. She loves commas. Her affliction is nothing less than a comma psychosis. She inserts them everywhere. It is like working with a comma on Viagra.

(Internet photo)

I did not know it then, but I would go on to write three books in that shed, including the one you are reading now. It was there that I began to write in the first person, using an ‘I‘ that is close to myself and yet is not myself.

Freedom is never free. Anyone who has struggled to be free knows how much it costs.

My own unhappiness was starting to become a habit, in the way Beckett described sorrow becoming “a thing you can keep adding to all your life … like a stamp or an egg collection.”

“I was re-reading the early novels and various essays and interviews by James Baldwin…” -Deborah Levy

It seems Baldwin is present wherever I turn today. 😊

The appeal of writing, as I understood it, was an invitation to climb in-between the apparent reality of things, to see not only the tree but the insects that live in its infrastructure, to discover that everything is connected in the ecology of language and living.

🌟🌟🌟🌟.5/5
Her honesty was so real and relatable. I havent been through a divorce but I feel like she captured what it would be like building a life with someone to it ending then being on your own again and being female building a new life. It was beautifully done I thought considering what a sad and hard time it would have been in her life. And yet she found humor in it. She was basically writing for her life. #bookreview #bookblogger

This book was reflective and introspective. Levy‘s musings on what it means to be a woman, an older woman who lives in defiance of society‘s expectations for her are lovely. #nonfiction #feminist

I did think this book was really good but I connected with it less than Things I Don‘t Want To Know - nobody‘s fault but it was about a very different stage in life than I‘m at and that made it harder to be really pulled in by the writing. I‘d recommend to someone older than me tho, or if you connect with the experience of ending a marriage or long relationship.