Ariel wanted a child but she also wanted to pursue her ambitions in journalism and create a financially stable life for herself. Ariel Levy was thirty eight when she got pregnant, before which she had been ambivalent about having a child. The literal summary provided makes even the miscarriage clear. I'm just going to talk openly about what happens in the memoir because it seems as though it's mostly all out there as is, and so I don't want people yelling at me about spoilers. In this profound and beautiful memoir, Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being “a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses.” Her own story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed-and of what is eternal. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules-about work, about love, and about womanhood. Levy picks you up and hurls you through the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. When thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker writer Ariel Levy left for a reporting trip to Mongolia in 2012, she was pregnant, married, financially secure, and successful on her own terms. A gorgeous, darkly humorous memoir about a woman overcoming dramatic loss and finding reinvention-for readers of Cheryl Strayed and Joan Didion

The rules do not apply memoir