You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Take a photo of a barcode or cover
julenetrippweaver 's review for:
The Rules Do Not Apply
by Ariel Levy
the rules do not apply, by Ariel Levy, contains some good writing and some privileged ideas that she has to go through great pain and sadness to learn do not apply. She grew up expecting she could do it all and have everything, a white privileged woman, but learns this is not possible. The problem is she blames her expectation on feminism, which is faulty from the start. It is more her privileged status that gives her this belief.
She's a good writer, New York Times stock, so it's an easy read and she nails the pain when she has her baby prematurely. Of course she chose to leave her home to take a work assignment in Mongolia in November five months into her pregnancy. What could go wrong? A lot. She had some pains she noted and ignored, she believed her doctor that taking a plane was fine. That is standard medical advice, but traveling thousands of miles to a work assignment in a rural country to travel into the bush to do interviews, she was lucky she was still in the city when the baby came, a premie, who would not survive, and that she had connections who gave her the name of a doctor who spoke English, and who was there for her despite the timing being not during work hours. Lucky or privileged in a position of power from her job and connections? What normal pregnant woman would have access she did? She had something called placental abruption, a rare problem that women with high blood pressure can get, or older women (and cocaine users, which she was not), in her case it was most likely because she was 38.
So although I enjoyed the book and the writing was excellent I found fault. Also her denial her partner had a drinking problem when it was so obvious from the beginning of their relationship to me as a reader. How could this very smart writer not see what was right in front of her. She's in the mid-90s into the 2000s in this book and she's missed the deep meaning of feminism.
Some quotes:
"There was an unapologetic ethos of consumption in New York City, which the magizine I worked for both satirized and promoted."
"It is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story." Virginia Woolf said in an address to the National Society for Women's Service, a group of female professionals, in 1931. "It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories."
"Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism."
"My mother knew instinctively that danger could come in a friendly box from the grocery store, full of brightly colored cereal that gets inside your body and rots you quietly from the inside out. She had inherited from her own mother the imigrant's mistrust for authority, and combined it with insurrectionary tendencies left over from her days as a student radical, and what it all added up to in the kitchen was a ban on Cheez Doodles."
"A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he's really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice."
She's a good writer, New York Times stock, so it's an easy read and she nails the pain when she has her baby prematurely. Of course she chose to leave her home to take a work assignment in Mongolia in November five months into her pregnancy. What could go wrong? A lot. She had some pains she noted and ignored, she believed her doctor that taking a plane was fine. That is standard medical advice, but traveling thousands of miles to a work assignment in a rural country to travel into the bush to do interviews, she was lucky she was still in the city when the baby came, a premie, who would not survive, and that she had connections who gave her the name of a doctor who spoke English, and who was there for her despite the timing being not during work hours. Lucky or privileged in a position of power from her job and connections? What normal pregnant woman would have access she did? She had something called placental abruption, a rare problem that women with high blood pressure can get, or older women (and cocaine users, which she was not), in her case it was most likely because she was 38.
So although I enjoyed the book and the writing was excellent I found fault. Also her denial her partner had a drinking problem when it was so obvious from the beginning of their relationship to me as a reader. How could this very smart writer not see what was right in front of her. She's in the mid-90s into the 2000s in this book and she's missed the deep meaning of feminism.
Some quotes:
"There was an unapologetic ethos of consumption in New York City, which the magizine I worked for both satirized and promoted."
"It is a very strange thing that people will give you a motor car if you will tell them a story." Virginia Woolf said in an address to the National Society for Women's Service, a group of female professionals, in 1931. "It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories."
"Daring to think that the rules do not apply is the mark of a visionary. It's also a symptom of narcissism."
"My mother knew instinctively that danger could come in a friendly box from the grocery store, full of brightly colored cereal that gets inside your body and rots you quietly from the inside out. She had inherited from her own mother the imigrant's mistrust for authority, and combined it with insurrectionary tendencies left over from her days as a student radical, and what it all added up to in the kitchen was a ban on Cheez Doodles."
"A real editor isn't just someone you work with; he's your guide. He sees your brain doing its thing and learns its weaknesses and abilities, and if he's really good, he figures out what you need to hear to compensate for the former and accentuate the latter. He is the person you trust with the most intimate thing you have, your own voice."