The Rules Do Not Apply

Chapter 1

My favorite game when I was a child was Mummy and Explorer. My father and I would trade off roles: One of us had to lie very still with eyes closed and arms crossed over the chest, and the other had to complain, I ve been searching these pyramids for so many years ­when will I ever find the tomb of Tutankhamun? (This was in the late seventies when Tut was at the Met, and we came in from the suburbs to visit him frequently.) At the climax of the game, the explorer stumbles on the embalmed Pharaoh and ­brace yourself ­the mummy opens his eyes and comes to life. The explorer has to express shock, and then say, So, what s new? To which the mummy replies, You.

I was not big on playing house. I preferred make-­believe that revolved around adventure, starring pirates and knights. I was also domineering, impatient, relentlessly verbal, and, as an only child, often baffled by the mores of other kids. I was not a popular little girl. I played Robinson Crusoe in a small wooden fort my parents built from a kit in the backyard, where I sorted through the acorns and onion grass I gathered for sustenance. In the fort, I was neither ostracized nor ill at ease ­I was self-­reliant, brave, ingeniously surviving, if lost.

Books are the other natural habitat for a child who loves words and adventures, and I was content when my parents read me Moby-­Dick, Pippi Longstocking, or The Hobbit. I decided early that I would be a writer when I grew up. That, I thought, was the profession that went with the kind of woman I wanted to become: one who is free to do whatever she chooses.

I started keeping a diary in the third grade and, in solidarity with Anne Frank, I named it and personified it and made it my confidante. The point that prompted me to keep a diary in the first place: I don t have a friend, Frank told Kitty, her journal. Writing is communicating with an unknown intimate who is always available, the way the faithful can turn to God. My lined notebooks were the

Ariel Levy

I read The Rules Do Not Apply in one long, rapt sitting. Unflinching and intimate, wrenching and revelatory, Ariel Levy s powerful memoir about love, loss, and finding one s way shimmers with truth and heart on every page. Cheryl Strayed 

Every deep feeling a human is capable of will be shaken loose by this profound book. Ariel Levy has taken grief and made art out of it. David Sedaris

Beautifully crafted . . . This book is haunting; it is smart and engaging. It was so engrossing that I read it in a day. The New York Times Book Review

Levy s wise and poignant memoir is the voice of a new generation of women, full of grit, pathos, truth, and inspiration. Being in her presence is energizing and ennobling. Reading her deep little book is inspiring. San Francisco Book Review

Levy has the rare gift of seeing herself with fierce, unforgiving clarity. And she deploys prose to match, raw and agile. She plumbs the commotion deep within and takes the measure of her have-it-all generation. The Atlantic

Cheryl Strayed meets a Nora Ephron movie. You ll laugh, ugly cry, and finish it before the weekend s over. theSkimm

This year s must-read memoir. W

Levy s tone is deeply honest, and at the same time manages to not be defensive or apologetic about her decisions; she s not judgmental, but remains highly inquisitive. The through line is her struggle to see things as accurately as possible, to translate her gift for interview and narrative into something personally productive. . . . I loved Levy s book. Jezebel

[The Rules Do Not Apply] is a short, sharp American memoir in the Mary Karr tradition of life-chronicling. . . . Levy, like Karr, is a natural writer who is also as unsparing and bleakly hilarious as it s possible to be about oneself. . . . I devoured her story in one sitting. Financial Times

It s an act of courage to hunt for meaning within grief,