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The Cost of Living by Deborah Levy
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The Cost of Living

A Working Autobiography

$13.64

Narrator Henrietta Meire
Length 2 hours 54 minutes
Language English
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To strip the wallpaper off the fairy tale of The Family House in which the comfort and happiness of men and children has been the priority is to find behind it an unthanked, unloved, neglected, exhausted woman.

The Cost of Living explores the subtle erasure of women's names, spaces, and stories in the modern everyday. In this "living autobiography" infused with warmth and humor, Deborah Levy critiques the roles that society assigns to us and reflects on the politics of breaking with the usual gendered rituals. What does it cost a woman to unsettle old boundaries and collapse the social hierarchies that make her a minor character in a world not arranged to her advantage?

Levy draws on her own experience of attempting to live with pleasure, value, and meaning—the making of a new kind of family home, the challenges of her mother's death—and those of women she meets in everyday life, from a young female traveler reading in a bar who suppresses her own words while she deflects an older man's advances, to a particularly brilliant student, to a kindly and ruthless octogenarian bookseller who offers the author a place to write at a difficult time in her life. The Cost of Living is urgent, essential reading, a crystalline manifesto for turbulent times.

Deborah Levy trained at Dartington College of Arts before becoming a playwright. Her plays include Pax, Heresies, Clam, Call Blue Jane, Shiny Nylon, Honey Baby Middle England, Pushing the Prince into Denmark, and Macbeth-False Memories. She has also written several novels and was a Fellow in Creative Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1989-1991.

Henrietta Meire is a full-time voice-over artist and actress. Her studio is her second home where she loves to engross herself in books of all genres and make characters come to life-from the girl next door to the troll-witch next door to a talking battery that lives with the girl next door! In addition to narrating a plethora of audiobooks, Henrietta has voiced numerous commercial and charity campaigns, as well as video game and animation characters. As an actress, Henrietta has performed in plays across the West End and Los Angeles and can be seen in a number of popular current movies as well as HBO and CBS shows.

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