Ariel Levy is on a first-name basis with Difficulty, with The Uncomfortable. I'm as avid a Levy fan as you can be without breaking the law, and it took me several tries to get purchase on her most recent New Yorker feature (March 3), about the in-your-face cult photographer Catherine Opie. In it Opie calls her 1994 photograph "Self-Portrait/Pervert," in which "pervert" is self-carved into her still-bleeding chest, "too intense for me now." Levy's word for it is "unnerving."
"Thanksgiving in Mongolia," from 2013, is one of Levy's most personal pieces, chronicling the premature birth and sudden death of her son on the bathroom floor of a hotel in Ulaanbaatar, where she had dispatched herself, five months pregnant, on assignment. In the penultimate paragraph comes a prototypical Levy sentence: "The truth is the ten or twenty minutes I was somebody's mother were black magic." That piece �" reprinted verbatim, as close as I can tell �" is the fuel core and the engine for The Rules Do Not Apply, Levy's brave new memoir (Random House).
One of the "rules," which comes back to haunt the author in her frequent moments of gnawing uncertainty and intermittent remorse, is about flying while pregnant. Why would a woman five months along fly to a country whose very name begs adjectives like "outer" and "fabled," on an assignment she's given herself? To think about things, including incipient motherhood, is one of the answers, but the others fill the book's 200 pages, always circling a landing over "Because." The rule is don't fly in your last trimester, something Levy researched with her usual tenacity before taking off and about which she was repeatedly reminded, in a consoling way, by a range of specialists who assured her that her child's death did not have to do with flying, or Mongolia, and that it was not her fault.
That's nothing to tell a woman who had been a mother for 10 or 20 minutes. Perhaps the only constant in her relentless musings about the event is her clarity that she did not have a miscarriage; she had a son. Ever after, she reports, "I saw him under my closed eyelids like an imprint from the sun." In daylight she endures the horror of seeing pregnant women everywhere, of having to tell a clothes-store clerk, "I don't know what size I am because I just had a baby. He died, but the good news is, now I'm fat."
To the well-meaners who never tire of asking whether they (the experts, the specialists) know what happened, Levy's best, sharpest and most truthful answer (when she can remember it) is, "Yeah I had bad luck." Yet in the very next paragraph a microgram of something like compassion dilutes the gall. "They want to know what they have to eat to keep from becoming me."
That's the tuning fork for the mordant humor that leavens the black magic in this fiercely honest memoir. Of her bumpy sexual awakening(s) she writes, "I was newly and (not entirely) gay; I had tried to slide casually in a dykeward direction without attracting too much attention from my skeptical friends." Her eventual spouse, Lucy, plucked live from a dead marriage to another woman, eventually leads to more black magic: after losing a son, then house, and then an identity, Levy loses Lucy to alcoholism.
The writing, which seems willing to consider anything, anything at all, turns out to be, conversely, an art of compression, not elaboration. In that eerie way that art does mirror life, many of Levy's deepest insights come in topic sentences, often simple sentences, at the ends of paragraphs.
The many threads in this story are delved into so deeply they become trunk lines. Pivotally, there's gay marriage itself, which, Levy says, she was so determined to get Lucy to see mattered little to her that she failed to see how much it mattered to Lucy. An extramarital affair with a former lover who had, not incidentally, transitioned from female to male since their last meeting, yields some of Levy's most harrowing writing.
Of the emotional climate of an affair, Levy writes, "This world is inside out. Every time it was transcendental. But then I started not wanting to leave after I put my clothes on. And then I was destroyed." Of intimacy and its discontents, she notes, "You have an affair to get for yourself what you wish would come from the person you love most. And then you have broken her heart and she can never give you any of it ever again."
My whole life I've found infuriating (probably because I felt cheated) parents' tireless assertion that "until you have a child, you can never understand." Against that rule, The Rules Do Not Apply has nudged unnervingly closer.