From the twice-Man Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Hot Milk and Swimming Home : Dazzling, essential, entirely unlike anything else -- a memoir on modern womanhood, rejecting oppressive social expectations and turning instead towards a thrilling, transformative freedom What does it mean to be free? What kind of women are we allowed to become? What would it feel like to live with truth, with integrity, with joy? And if we could find those things, would we be brave enough to claim them? In this astonishing memoir, Deborah Levy confronts the essential questions of modern womanhood with humour, pragmatism, and profoundly resonant wisdom. Reflecting on the period when she wrote the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted Hot Milk - when her mother was dying, her daughters were leaving home, her marriage was coming to an end - The Cost of Living is characteristically eloquent on mothers and daughters, social expectations and surreal realities, and the fraught, necessary creative process of the writer. Expanding out from these ideas, it becomes a manifesto for female experience, as the author embraces the exhilarating terror of freedom, seeking to understand what that freedom could mean and how it might feel. Praise for Deborah Levy's Hot Milk: 'Mythic, dreamlike... A literary triumph' Financial Times Books of the Year 'A beautifully rich, vividly atmospheric and psychologically complex exploration of mother-daughter interdependency. Every woman should read it' Bernardine Evaristo, author of Mr Loverman and the forthcoming Girl, Woman, Other 'A powerful novel about a daughter's struggle to define herself, Levy draws attention to the mythic in all of us [and] shows us the exquisite difficulty of realising that, in a world of myths, we have the freedom to write our own parts' Spectator