The Rules Do Not Apply

by Ariel Levy

Freedom, however, is not the last word. Freedom is only part of the story and half of the truth. —VIKTOR FRANKL, MAN’S SEARCH FOR MEANING (1946)

“If only they had found it sooner,” I said, pleading. “Yeah,” said my father, “and if only I had two penises I could be in the circus.”

We met in the middle of a blackout.

the cool shade of the redwoods, the clean smell of forest rot rising around us.

vodka sodas with Meyer lemon juice—West Coast Sparklers, we named them.

We tore through sobriety together, drink by drink, until we occupied a separate reality from the rest of the world.

I worried, for example, about being “heteronormative”—which is something I would say as a joke because it’s a made-up word from the land of academic absurdity—but

“Jesus,” said my father, when I called to tell him I’d been hired to write for The New Yorker. “Well, nowhere to go but down.”

For as long as I can remember, I have felt the shtetl nipping at my heels.

Albert died bankrupt but content, his regrets and longings erased by Alzheimer’s.

We’re just in a hell of our own making half the time.

She punished me by routinely getting inebriated at the worst possible times, which I hated but knew I deserved. (It did not cross my mind that this might not be all about me.)

Dimitris’s wife, Yiota, looked like a pretty, redheaded Muppet.

I called Emma, who’d recently gotten pregnant, and described how I felt: slightly sick, slightly insane, zooming with adrenaline.

To be pregnant is to be in some kind of discomfort pretty much all the time.

Only much later did I see that it had never mattered which questions I had asked her or how shrewdly I had scrutinized her answers. Addicts lie.