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, their shared home no longer exists, and her mother is dying. Now left to her own devices, Levy takes these painful upheavals as an opportunity to rethink from the ground up what it means to live a meaningful, fulfilling, and 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 precise examination of middle age, a wise updating of Simone de Beauvoir's thoughts, and a text that offers sentence after sentence, point after point for the notebook. Every sentence is a small masterpiece, transforming an individual story into a wise and captivating testimony of a profoundly human experience. Life falls apart. We try to take hold of it, to keep it together. Until we eventually realize that we don't actually want to hold it together at all.