So this was my book club’s latest pick! I don’t read much memoir, so I was excited to dive into this!

The Cost of Living is what Levy calls a “living memoir”, capturing a period of time after her divorce. So the first thing to note (and this is something the whole book club agreed on), is that the language is absolutely beautiful. I read it twice, in fact, one to get to know the book and one to pick out quotes I liked. Here are some sentences that I thought were beautiful:

“It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rituals”

Me: SO TRUE

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

“To separate from love is to live a risk-free life”

Me: I agree but the rest of the chapter seems to look at romantic love and neglects other types of love? So what kind of love is she referring to?

“As Simone de Beauvoir had told us, women are not supposed to eclipse men in a world in which success and power are marked out for them. […] The pain of the contemporary middle-aged male who, having failed to entirely suppress women, perceived himself as disempowered is a delicate matter. Their women lie delicately for them.”

Regarding this quote – I read somewhere that this book is a sort of response to Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. I think this is why I was, despite the fact, somewhat dissatisfied with the book – more on that after two more quotes.

“What do we need dreamy mothers for? We do not want mothers who gaze beyond us, longing to be elsewhere, we need her to be of this world, lively, capable, entirely present to our needs.

“Did I mock the dreamer in my mother and then insult her for having no dreams?”

I mentioned in between the quotes that I was somewhat dissatisfied with the book, and that is because I never really knew what the book wanted to be. It’s more vague than a regular memoir (for example, we don’t know much about her daughters, other than she has them, or why she divorced her husband) and while Levy makes very good observations about womanhood, it never really rises above the level of observations. Was this supposed to be a feminist work exploring the nature of what it means to be a woman? Or was this a memoir? The book seemed to straddle both categories in a rather dissatisfying way.

We did discuss this at our book club, and our conclusion was that this vagueness was probably intentional, to allow the reader to put themselves in Levy’s shoes more effectively. I can’t say I like it (because I would have loved for this to have more feminist discussion) but I understand where it’s from.

Overall, this is a beautifully written work that should be read and accepted for what it is. If you’re going to pick it up, don’t expect a book that hews to the conventions of a memoir or regular essay/nonfiction and I think you’ll enjoy the book.