The Cost of Living is a memoir about the period following Levy’s separation from her husband. She moves into a dreary apartment unit with her two daughters, loses her mother, takes every job she is offered, and continues writing, in a rented garden-shed. Everything is entirely new, home, and work.
The book is also about other things, like cycling up and down a hill between the garden shed, home and grocery store; buying a chicken to roast for dinner which tumbles out of the torn shopping bag and is flattened by a car; putting up silk curtains in the bedroom and painting the walls yellow; showing up to a meeting about optioning the film rights to her novel with leaves in her hair; visiting her mother at a hospital. When her mother was too ill to eat or drink, she brought her ice lollies from a Turkish kiosk. Her mother’s favorite flavor was lime which, in the final days of her life, the kiosk did not have.
She is truly, in Henry James’s phrase, someone “upon whom nothing is lost.” She captures the trivial and frivolous incidents in her life and understands the profound implications of them.
I like to read her contemplation to her own life, her viewpoint on many things. I am not feminist, but I agree what she says: “When our father does the things he needs to do in the world, we understand it’s his due. If our mother does the things she needs to do in the world, we feel she has abandoned us.”
Recently, memoir is a very popular genre. It seems every one can write about themselves, about a period of their lives. I hope I can write like her, writing down what I am thinking and what I am feeling.