'Yeah: I'm a white lady,' she said, an audible shrug. Has privilege been the movement's undoing? Levy's memoir tackles symbiotic concepts of personal agency and self-interest-because 'daring to think the rules do not apply' may be 'the mark of a visionary,' as she writes, but 'it's also a symptom of narcissism.' That conflict recalls recent criticism of today's feminism as a trend too tightly entangled with narcissism to have any real bite. 'I didn't get what I want so I guess no one does,' was Shane's takeaway. For a woman who has enjoyed so many advantages to complain about a series of sad but, as the New Republic's Charlotte Shane argued, reasonably commonplace occurrences is just totally typical and illustrative of what's wrong with white feminism. That view, Levy readily acknowledges, comes from a place of privilege, and that's the largest complaint that's been levied against her memoir. Women like Diana Nyad, who-at age 64-became the first person ever to swim from Cuba to Florida.

Women like Edith Windsor, the octogenarian at the center of the Supreme Court case that legalized gay marriage. First for New York magazine and then for the New Yorker, she has written about women who are, in her words, 'too much.' Unconventional women women who buck tradition women who make themselves the protagonists in their own stories, she explained. Read more: Exploring the Terror of Motherhood with Latin America's Most Promising Novelistįor two decades, Levy's work has probed the female experience: 'What does it mean to be a woman? What are the rules?' she writes in her memoir. 'But I think every woman at some point in her life will have some kind of epic experience around menstruation, fertility, paternity, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause, all these very animal aspects of being female.' 'Not every woman will have a child, not every woman-God knows-will lose a child,' she said. 'My dad said another title for this book could've been Tough Shit,' Levy gamely mused, and while the shit she's been served is undeniably tough, it also speaks, on a native level, to the often bloody enterprise of womanhood.

It is remarkable in its eloquent, unvarnished presentation of nightmarish loss and its utter lack of self-pity. The Rules Do Not Apply addresses each added blow in the clear-eyed manner of a journalist used to making sense of other people's lives. First came the miscarriage-a word that feels clumsy in Levy's context-then came the dissolution of her marriage and the loss of a home a few weeks later. 'It's hard to comprehend, if you haven't experienced it, how real of a loss is when you're the one losing,' Levy told Broadly.

The rules do not apply by ariel levy