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The New Yorker’s Ariel Levy and Emily Nussbaum discuss Levy’s “painful, funny” new memoir “The Rules Do Not Apply.”
When 38-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 month later, none of that was true.
In “The Rules Do Not Apply,” Levy tells the story of how she built an unconventional life and then watched it fall apart with astonishing speed. Like much of her generation, she was raised to resist traditional rules—about work, about love, and about womanhood.
“I wanted what we all want: everything. We want a mate who feels like family and a lover who is exotic, surprising. We want to be youthful adventurers and middle-aged mothers. We want intimacy and autonomy, safety and stimulation, reassurance and novelty, coziness and thrills. But we can’t have it all.”
Levy discusses her "grieving, hopeful, painful, funny" memoir with Emily Nussbaum, Pulitzer Prize-winning TV critic for the New Yorker. 
Azar Nafisi talks with host Rich Fahle about her latest novel, The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books, at the 2017 AWP Book Fair.
FROM THE PUBLISHER:
Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics of English and American literature to her eager students in Iran. In this electrifying follow-up, she argues that fiction is just as threatened—and just as invaluable—in America today.
Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite novels, she describes the unexpected journey that led her to become an American citizen after first dreaming of America as a young girl in Tehran and coming to know the country through its fiction. She urges us to rediscover the America of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and challenges us to be truer to the words and spirit of the Founding Fathers, who understood that their democratic experiment would never thrive or survive unless they could foster a democratic imagination. Nafisi invites committed readers everywhere to join her as citizens of what she calls the Republic of Imagination, a country with no borders and few restrictions, where the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream. Louise Gray came into talk about her new book, The Ethical Carnivore. Fed up of friends claiming to care about where their meat comes from, Louise decided to follow the argument to its logical extreme and only eat animals she kills herself for a year.
Recorded in London, February 2017
Louise is former Environment Correspondent on The Daily Telegraph. She has been freelance since 2014, specializing in writing about food, farming and climate change for, among others, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, Scottish Field, Country Life and the Spectator. Louise has also featured on BBC TV and radio.
You can find out more about Louise at www.louisebgray.com or follow her @loubgray.
