Finding herself divorced and unhomed at age fifty, writer Deborah Levy finds herself reassessing her life. In prose both beautiful and elliptical, she uses this book to begin engaging with the ideas Simone de Beauvoir first posed in The Second Sex: how to reconcile a life of love and sex and desire with intellectual liberty when you're a woman. What Levy has produced is something like A Room of One's Own for the 21st century, a manifesto on women's work. More than any other book this year, The Cost of Living has lingered with me : it is the book I have most often gifted the women in my life, and which I would most want to have gifted to me.
— Madeleine
An exercise in metaphor, Levy tries them on like clothes when describing (to you? to herself?) her quest for "more life" after a divorce at 50; sometimes they fit and sometimes they don't, but she wears them regardless.
— Bekah