The Cost of Living

Dazzling, essential, unlike anything else published today – a memoir on modern womanhood, smashing through social expectations and making the case for thrilling, transformative freedom

What does it mean to be free – as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom?

In this dazzling memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom. Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk – when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end – she is characteristically eloquent on the social expectations and surreal realities of daily life. And expanding far beyond these bounds, she describes a uniquely frank, wise and thrilling manifesto for female experience- embracing the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel.

Author Biography

Deborah Levy is the author of several novels including August Blue, Hot Milk and Swimming Home, alongside a formally innovative, critically acclaimed ‘living autobiography’ trilogy- Things I Don’t Want to Know, The Cost of Living and Real Estate. She has been shortlisted twice each for the Goldsmiths Prize and Booker Prize and won the Prix Femina Etranger. She has also written for The Royal Shakespeare Company and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.