The Cost of Living

<b>From the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of <i>Hot Milk </i>and <i>Swimming Home </i>:</b><br /><b></b><br /><b>Dazzling, essential, entirely unlike anything else -- a memoir on modern womanhood, rejecting oppressive social expectations and turning instead towards a thrilling, transformative freedom</b><br /><br />What does it mean to be free - as an artist, a woman, a mother or daughter? And what is the price of that freedom?<br /><br />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.