The New Yorker writer had a life that balanced domesticity with intellectual and sexual adventure. Then it fell apart
Ariel Levy’s new memoir begins with a description of disorientation. “For the first time I can remember, I cannot locate my competent self,” she writes. “In the last few months, I have lost my son, my spouse, and my house. Every morning I wake up and for a few seconds I’m disoriented, confused as to why I feel grief seeping into my body, and then I remember what has become of my life.” In the book that follows, Levy examines the choices that brought her to this point of collapse. Was she the agent of her own destruction? Did she ask too much of life?
The story of how Levy lost her son was first published in the New Yorker in 2013. A staff writer for the magazine, she had a miscarriage in a hotel room while on assignment in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, when she was 19 weeks pregnant. Her son was born alive, but did not survive; Levy held him in her hand as he died. She spent a night in the hospital, then returned home to New York with “a longing – ferocious, primal, limitless, crazed – for the only person I had ever made”.
Anything seemed possible if you had ingenuity, money, and tenacity. But the body doesn’t play by those rules
The compassion Levy does not give to herself is left to the reader, who will feel it on her behalf
Continue reading...from Pregnancy | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2ne1Xwm
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