Was das Leben kostet

Outstanding and beautiful, full of wit and razor-sharp insights. Deborah Levy is around fifty when her life changes radically. She and her husband go their separate ways, the older daughter moves out, the shared home no longer exists, and her mother is dying. Now left to her own devices, Levy uses these painful upheavals as an opportunity to rethink from the ground up what it means to lead a meaningful, fulfilling, self-determined life as a woman. What It Costs to Live is the sharply articulated testimony of a woman who must piece her life back together, and at the same time so much more: a keen examination of middle age, a wise updating of Simone de Beauvoir's thoughts, and a text that offers sentence after sentence and punchlines for the notebook. Every sentence is a small masterpiece, transforming an individual story into a life-wise and captivating testament to a profoundly human experience. Life falls apart. We try to take hold of it, try to hold it together. Until we eventually realize that we don’t actually want to hold it together at all.