"The Cost of Living" by Deborah Levy

After spending a lot of time lately reading fairly lengthy books, mostly for the various book clubs I belong to -- and falling slightly behind on my Goodreads Reading Challenge goal for this year -- I decided that my next read would be a shorter book of my own choosing. I turned to  "The Cost of Living" by Deborah Levy, which is a sequel to "Things I Don't Want to Know" (reviewed here), and part 2 of a trilogy.  In hardcover, it's 187 well-spaced pages, using a generous type size. 

"If a woman dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape, how might she describe this new composition?" the flyleaf description reads (in part). 

"The Cost of Living" recounts a tumultuous period in Levy's life, including the end of her marriage, and the death of her mother, which stirs up memories of her childhood and her arrival in England. She moves, with her two daughters, out of the family home and into "a flat on the sixth floor of a shabby apartment block on the top of a hill in North London."  It's difficult to write there, but a friend comes to the rescue with the offer of a garden shed/studio in her backyard, where her late husband, a poet, used to write. Levy rents it from her and purchases an e-bike to travel between the two spaces.     

“Chaos is supposed to be what we most fear but I have come to believe it might be what we most want," Levy reflects.  

If we don’t believe in the future we are planning, the house we are mortgaged to, the person who sleeps by our side, it is possible that a tempest (long lurking in the clouds) might bring us closer to how we want to be in the world. Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realize we don’t want to hold it together.

Like "Things I Don't Want to Know," the story seemingly rambles from one incident/anecdote/memory to the next. Gradually, certain themes and recurring motifs begin to emerge. As with the first book, the writing is absorbing and full of gems -- it made me think.   

As a childless woman in a pronatalist world, I especially appreciated this passage:  

When a woman has to find a new way of living and breaks from the societal story that has erased her name, she is expected to be viciously self-hating, crazed with suffering, tearful with remorse. These are the jewels reserved for her in the patriarchy’s crown, always there for the taking. There are plenty of tears, but it is better to walk through the black and bluish darkness than reach for those worthless jewels.

3.5 stars on StoryGraph. I debated whether to round that rating up or down for Goodreads. My original impulse was to downgrade to 3 stars -- but after I sat with the book for a while, and went back to re-read a few passages, I decided to (once again) round up to 4 stars.  I'm hoping to get to Part 3 of Levy's "Living Autobiography," "Real Estate," later this year. 

(I will swear that, in "Things I Don't Want to Know," she wrote about her son -- here, a son is not mentioned, but she writes about her two teenaged/young adult daughters. I did a search through my e-copy for the word "son," but turned up nothing -- did I imagine him??  Her Wikipedia entry only mentions the two daughters.)   

This was Book #20 read to date in 2024 (and Book #3 finished in June), bringing me to 44%  of my 2024 Goodreads Reading Challenge goal of 45 books. I am (for the moment, anyway...!) 1 book behind schedule to meet my goal. :)  You can find reviews of all my books read to date in 2024 tagged as "2024 books."