Every Woman Should Read 'The Rules Do Not Apply'

Before jumping into her own story, Levy takes time at the beginning of her memoir to explore exactly why telling stories, especially women's stories, is important at all. In recounting her first big assignment with New York magazine — she decides, without asking her editors, to profile a nightclub for obese women — Levy is honest about her fears of being a new writer, and confesses that it's her desire to tell real stories that helps get her through.

"It was scary, but electrifying," she described of her experience the first night at the club. "What we're writing is more important than your anxiety and humiliation, my competent self told me. So I went up to compete strangers with my notebook, and asked them to tell me their stories. And they did."

Her experiences talking to these fat women, learning about their lives and their experiences, their fears and their truths, shape Levy's career in a profound way. She follows this thread of telling true stories about real women, women the rest of the world was happy to overlook or criticize, throughout her life, and even more so, in her memoir.

Levy's memoir isn't just a narrative about her life. It's a story about every woman who has ever been told they should sit down, shut up, and behave a little bit better, a little bit more like a girl. Levy has always considered herself to be one of those women society deemed "too much."

"People have been telling me since I was a little girl that I was too fervent, too forceful, too much," the author confesses. Throughout her life, she is faced with this criticism that she was too much like a man, not enough like a woman. She asks for too much, demands too much, strives for too much. But instead of letting it change her or diminish her, she uses it to inspire her work as a writer, and as a storyteller.

From the start of her career in the 1990s to the assignment that brings her to Mongolia that fateful November to the narratives of she shares in her memoir, her own and the subjects of her journalism, Levy seeks out and tells "stories about women who are too much," as she puts it.

While her memoir covers many aspects to Levy's dizzying life, The Rules Do Not Apply starts, ends, and is centered around one particularly heartbreaking story: the delivery and subsequent loss of her son. And while she isn't afraid to share her grief over his death, she doesn't shy away from discussing the conflicting emotions many modern women have about motherhood, either.

"To become a mother, I feared" Levy admits to readers in the first chapter, "was to relinquish your status as the protagonist of your own story." Levy articulates what so many young women feel about the prospect of having children: the fear of losing control of your own life, of losing all your independence. While she grapples with these complex emotions, she also can't help but notice the pressures society puts on her, and other women, to hurry up and become moms already.

"One day you are very young and then suddenly you are thirty-five and it is Time. You have to reproduce, or else."

Levy identifies the desire to be free and the pressure to have a family that pull most women back and forth, but recognizes in herself that, ultimately, she wants to become a mother. When she does finally become pregnant, "It was like magic," she describes. "A little eye of newt in my cauldron and suddenly I was a witch with the power to brew life into being."

Although it ended in heartbreak in a hotel bathroom, Levy says "the truth is, the ten of twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic. There is no place I would have rather seen."

Women — especially women often deemed "too much" — are told to calm down, bottle their emotions, and relax. As females, we're conditioned to hide our emotions, because they're a sign of weakness, of being "less than" male. But Levy doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks about her feelings, and she unflinchingly describes every single one.

From her desire for her wife to her anxiety about her career, her fear and frustration about her failing marriage to her elation about motherhood, Levy candidly, unapologetically explains her feelings with clarity and ease, especially those around the loss of her son.

“I cried only once during the twenty-one-hour flight. I was looking out the window at the moon and thinking of the last long trip I took across the sky, and of the person who went with me and didn't come back. For a while, it was as poisonous and wrenching as it had been since the day it happened, as intolerable: a crime against nature. Then the grief went back to sleep in my body. And it was again nature herself.

Nature. Mother Nature. She is free to do whatever she chooses.”

Levy's experiences, and her own emotional narrative, reminds readers that feelings are natural and meant to be felt and expressed, wholly and without shame.

"Women of my generation were given the lavish gift of our own agency by feminism," Levy explains to her readers "a belief that we could decide for ourselves how we would live, what would become of us." She uses this framing throughout her memoir to examine the choices she makes, including her career, her marriage, and, ultimately, her decision to have a child.

As she gets older, however, and her perfect narrative starts to fall apart, Levy begins to recognize the truth: life is rarely what we expect it to be.

"Until recently, I lived in a world where lost things could always be replaced. But it has made overwhelmingly clear to me now that anything you think is yours by right can vanish, and what you can do about that is nothing at all."

Levy doesn't come to this conclusion with negativity or a feeling of defeat, but rather a sense of acceptance, and even excitement. She understands that having it all, whether you're a successful businessman and family man or a divorced lesbian and grieving mother, is impossible. The important part is that we try, because life is never what we plan for, but that doesn't mean it's not worth living.