“Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It’s also a symptom of narcissism. “

This is certainly a tear-jerker.

I only picked this one up because I thought it was by Ariel Leve, whose memoir I read last year & mostly enjoyed, but I was wrong. Luckily, this mistake led to reading Ariel Levy’s  very well written but very sad memoir.

From the back cover: When thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A month later, none of that was true.

In The Rules Do Not Apply, Levy briefly chronicles her childhood and her parents’ relationship before delving into her own courtship, marriage and the loss of her child. It’s a heart wrenching story about love and loss with a lot of self-reflection and heartbreaking confessions. I don’t want to give away more than the publisher’s blurb but I will say Levy is a talented, honest writer who details a difficult time in her life with finesse.

“Even if one life is manifest and the other is mostly hypothetical, the inability to occupy your own reality is torment, is torture. It is sin and punishment all in one.”