The bestselling modern manifesto on the politics of womanhood from Deborah
Levy, author of the Booker Prize finalists Hot Milk and Swimming Home. A
New York Times Notable Book A New York Public Library Best Nonfiction Book
of 2018 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? 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,
longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal in Nonfiction, is crucial
testimony, as distinctive, witty, complex, and original as Levy's acclaimed
novels.