melanie_dc 's review for:

The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy

4.0

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While I'm not sure I'd be friends with Ariel in real life, I loved her memoir, mostly for its raw, honest, beautiful writing and structure. It's not chronological; it's almost a collection of essays, as she explains how she lost her baby (a graphic miscarriage), her wife and her house almost all at once. It's a memoir of grief and shock, but also an affair. I think the latter part is why a lot of people's reviews declare they don't like her, and she definitely has issues she needed (needs) to resolve, but what human is perfect? And do we really want to read a memoir of a put-together, boring life? There are also a lot of reviews that are unforgiving because she didn't examine her white privilege. Is that a requirement of memoirs nowadays? Can she write about her own experiences without doing the academic work of looking at it from all of society and how society might view her in 2018? A lot of people don't seem to think so.