Deborah Levy wrote a trilogy of autobiographical memoirs about motherhood, marriage, and female ambition. I read them all. Starting with: 

THE COST OF LIVING by Deborah Levy 

The second book in Levy’s memoir trilogy examines the collapse of a marriage but, more specifically, the evolution of a woman saving herself. I gifted this memoir to all my girlfriends for Christmas. But it might have been wiser to gift it to all the males in my life? Unfortunately, I don’t think any of them would read it. So what does that say about the males in my life?  

Levy raises questions about men and women’s attempts to coexist, especially as a female artist. Themes explored in Woolf’s, A Room of One’s Own but sadly updated with very few societal revolutions. She writes about the hierarchies that make women minor characters in their own lives. It’s an honest and important look at one woman’s cost of living, but really, all of ours. 

Favorite line(s): As the vintage story goes, it is the father who is the hero and the dreamer. He detaches himself from the pitiful needs of his women and children and strides out into the world to do his thing. He is expected to be himself. When he returns to the home that our mothers have made for us, he is either welcomed back into the fold, or becomes a stranger who will eventually need us more than we need him. He tells us some of what he has seen in his world. We give him an edited version of the living we do every day. Our mothers live with us in this living and we blame her for everything because she is nearby. At the same time, we try not to collude with myths about her character and purpose in life. All the same, we need her to feel anxiety on our behalf—after all, our everyday living is full of anxiety. If we do not disclose our feelings to her, we mysteriously expect her to understand them anyway. And if she moves beyond us, comes close to being a self that is not at our service, she has transgressed from the mythic, primal task of being our protector and nurturer. Yet, if she comes too close, she suffocates us, infecting our fragile courage with her contagious anxiety. When our father does the thing she needs to do in the world, we understand it is his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us. It is a miracle she survives our mixed messages, written in society’s most poisoned ink. It is enough to drive her mad.

  

REAL ESTATE: A LIVING AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Deborah Levy

More like “unreal estate.” Levy, in the third book in the trilogy, looks outside her interior life into the physical and her quest for “a house by the sea with a pomegranate tree, an egg-shaped fireplace, and a rowboat named (after the gospel singer) the Sister Rosetta.” She’s not sure who is in this house with her, but she explores, dreamlike, all the possible options. When her youngest daughter leaves for college, Levy accepts a fellowship in Paris and her adventures begin. Does she get the house by the sea? Was that the point of all of it? No spoiler alerts here.  

Favorite line(s): It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves. 

THINGS I DON’T WANT TO KNOW by Deborah Levy

In the first book in the trilogy, Levy looks inside the home and the role of mother and wife and living a creative life. Women, she contends, spend a lot of time and effort creating a home for the family at the expense of their artistic desires. 

Favorite line(s): Mother should ‘be’ and were cursed with the desire to not be disappointing. We did not yet entirely understand that Mother, as imagined and politicized by the Societal System, was a delusion. The world loved the delusion more than it loved the mother. All the same, we felt guilty about unveiling this delusion in case the niche we had made for ourselves and our much-loved children collapsed in ruins around our muddy trainers—which were probably sewn together by child slaves in sweatshops all over the globe. It was mysterious because it seemed to me that the male world and its political arrangements (never in favour of children and women) was actually jealous of the passion we felt for our babies. Like everything that involves love, our children made us happy beyond measure—and unhappy too—but never as miserable as the twenty-first-century Neo-Patriarchy made us feel.

 

NIGHTBITCH by Rachel Yoder

Equal parts literary and fairy tale, Nightbitch is the story of an artist turned stay-at-home mom to her newborn son. One day she discovers a patch of coarse hair at the back of her neck, and her canine teeth take on dog-like sharpness. While her husband is on the road working five days a week, our narrator takes to roaming the streets, rummaging through forests and neighborhoods, surprising herself at her alternative canine identity. A novel about womanhood and power, Nightbitch is howling good fun with a serious message.  

Favorite line(s): This thing comes from us, she would explain in interviews. It rips its way out of us, literally tears us in two, in a wash of great pain and blood and shit and piss. If the child does not enter into the world this way, then it is cut from us with a knife. The child is removed, and our organs are taken out as well, before being sewn back inside. It is perhaps the most violent experience a human can have aside from death itself. And this performance is meant to underscore the brutality and power and darkness of motherhood, for modern motherhood has been neutered and sanitized. We are at best animals, and to deny us either our animal nature or our dignity as humans is a crime against existence. Womanhood and motherhood are perhaps the most potent forces in human society, which of course men have been hasty to quash for they are right to fear these forces.

 

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND by Anthony Doerr

Let me get this out of the way: Anthony Doerr could write a grocery list and make coffee, eggs, and lemons sound achingly beautiful. He is that good. That excellent in whatever world he’s writing about. And his latest is filled with strange and wonderful worlds. Present-day Boise, Idaho. A Korean prisoner of war camp. Fifteenth-century Constantinople. And on a spaceship decades into the future. Sounds “cuckoo?” Well, the settings and characters—Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno, and Konstance—are interwoven over time through a book and its story of Aethon, who yearns to turn into a bird and fly to a paradise above the clouds called Cuckoo Land. The tale is epic, and so is this novel. Evocative and stunning in every way possible. I dog-eared so many pages of sublime prose I couldn’t find one stand out favorite section—but here is one I just turned to:

Favorite line(s): “Maria,” she says, “Listen,” and starts at the beginning. 

Drunken, foolhardy Aethon mistakes a magical city in a play for a real place. He sets off for Thessaly, land of magic, and accidentally turns himself into a donkey. This time she is able to make quicker progress, and as she reads aloud, something curious happens: as long as she keeps a steady stream of words flowing past Maria’s ears, her sister doesn’t seem to suffer so much. Her muscles loosen; her head falls to Anna’s shoulder. Aethon-the-donkey is kidnapped by bandits, gets lashed to a wheel by the miller’s son, walks on his tired, cracking hooves to the place where nature comes to an end. Maria doesn’t moan in pain or whisper about invisible subterranean miners scratching beneath the floor. She sits beside her, blinking into the candlelight, amusement playing over her face.