The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir

"In this memoir, New Yorker writer Ariel Levy reflects on her life leading up to a breathtakingly painful period that – at the risk of sounding cliché – changed everything. Instead of being a downer, this ends up as a hopeful meditation on womanhood and a universal question: What’s the most we should expect from ourselves and our bodies? It’s also a rumination on memory, family, commitment and the frailty of those things. You don’t have to be a woman for Levy’s writing to resonate, though. It’s unfailingly raw and relentlessly human."