The Price of Living Author: [UK] Deborah Levy Publisher: Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House

Introduction · · · · · ·
The second part of Deborah Levy's trilogy on women's growth: on women and family life. It was rated as one of the "100 best works of the 21st century" by The Guardian and won the 2020 Femina Foreign Literature Award in France. "Life collapsed. We tried to control ourselves and stay calm. Then we found that we didn't want to stay calm..." How much does a woman have to pay to break the old boundaries and get a small role in a world that is not good for her? This is the story of every woman in history-they created a home with their love and labor, and ended up meeting the needs of everyone except themselves.

In this short, emotional and controversial documentary, the writer Levy not only frankly recalls the darkest moments of her life, such as the breakdown of her marriage and the death of her mother, but also thinks about what is a meaningful, valuable and enjoyable life for women. She cites the works of artists or thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, James Baldwin, Elena Ferrante, Margaret Duras, David Lynch and Emily Dickinson to outline what is the ultimate freedom of women's lives. Li Yiyun and Jeanette Winterson highly recommend this book, and it is a desk book for Oscar-winning actress Natalie Portman.

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※ Levi has a keen eye for the ordinary and subtle, sketching out unforgettable details with just a few strokes.

——Li Yiyun (American writer)

※ I fell in love with Deborah Levy's The Price of Living, and was amazed at how she wove gender, politics, travel, and grief into a poignant story.

——Natalie Portman (American actor)

※ This is the story of every woman in history who has created a home with her love and labor, and as a result, met the needs of everyone except herself. This work is less a memoir than an eloquent manifesto for Levy's "new way of living" in a post-domestic world.

——The Guardian

Levy is a generous writer. The beauty of this short, emotional, controversial memoir is that it’s not just about painful milestones in her life—the end of her marriage, her mother’s death—it’s also about what it means to be alive. I can’t think of a better writer than Virginia Woolf who writes about marginality, family, non-events, and what it means to be a woman. This is a small book about big themes, about how to find a new way to live.

——The Observer

※ Clever, practical, and straightforward. An adventurous and radical declaration of life. The water may be too deep for you to swim, but you can still swim in it.

——New Statesman

※ Every sentence is a little masterpiece of clarity and elegance.

——The Telegraph

※ Levy doesn’t tell other women to live her way, or any way at all. As a mature feminist, she won’t do that. However, she wants us to know her joy, and she thrives in this new and unknown life. The same is true of her writing. The last sentence of the book is phrased like this: "The words you read now are made of digital ink at the cost of life."

--National Broadcasting Corporation

※ In her fifties, Levy is writing her life not for her peers but for a new generation. Because we tend to talk about feminism as waves separated by generational gaps (most recently the alleged rift between millennials and baby boomers), we often focus on the divisions among women. What if we viewed the situation of all women as an attempt to fight to see themselves as primary actors in a society that only gives them secondary role status?

——Harper