Review
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“My latest favorite. . . Ariel Leve grew up on Manhattan’s
Upper East Side, wanting for nothing except everything that
matters to a kid: safety, security, predictability, unconditional
love. Her dad lived in Southeast Asia, and her mom was needy and
wildly unpredictable, and saved her charm for drunken revelers
who partied loudly while Leve tried to fall a. . . . As an
adult, she once crossed paths with a former party guest, who told
a mutual acquaintance, ‘I always wondered how that little girl
would survive. I thought her only choices were suicide or
murder.’ To learn how Leve saved herself, you must read this
distressing and inspiring book.’” (Elisabeth Egan, The Miami
Herald)
“The staccato style of this searing memoir enhances the harshness
and emotional power of what is a frightening story by a brave
author, who resolutely describes herself as ‘a long-distance
runner through the canyon of childhood’—a modest understatement.
An unstinting portrayal of psychological abuse, both inful
and precisely told.” (John Irving)
“An Abbreviated Life (Harper), an explosive new memoir from
accled journalist Ariel Leve, chronicles Leve’s dismal
childhood under the primary care of her riveting, glamourous,
intellectual, and ultimately incredibly destructive mother. . . .
In the company of captivating memoirists Mary Karr and Alexandra
Fuller.” (Elle)
“A powerful and frequently devastating account of a childhood
without boundaries and dominated by loneliness, chaos and fear.
Leve’s recollections can be brutal but are made digestible by the
elegant sparseness of her prose.” (The Guardian)
“Mesmerizing... A portrait of something familiar gone wildly,
tragically awry.” (New York Times)
“Leve…writes in beautiful, staccato sentences and weaves her own
story together masterfully.” (Evening Standard (London))
“Leve’s prose is soulful, cryptic, musing.” (Sheila Weller, New
York Observer)
“Ariel Leve’s haunting memoir about life with her unpredictable
mother is maddening, devastating and consuming.” (Minnesota
Public Radio, "Best Books of 2016")
“An Abbreviated Life adds a harrowing chapter to the great
tragi-comedy called “We Don’t Get To Choose Our Parents.” Ariel
Leve’s extremely readable memoir is, at its heart, a story about
surviving childhood—a trick we must all perform. Even in its raw
extremes, her story is a universal one.” (Richard Ford)
“Out of a childhood that seems just about impossible to have
survived, Ariel Leve has written a haunting, indelible story that
becomes its own form of redemption. This is an act of bravery
that strikes me not only as a literary achievement, but a human
one.” (Dani Shapiro)
From the Back Cover
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In this extraordinary memoir, Ariel Leve takes us through the
looking glass into the life of an only child growing up under
siege. The unconventional world Ariel inhabited was dominated by
her mother, a gifted but unstable poet without boundaries or
self-restraint. Mother and daughter lived in a penthouse on
Manhattan’s Upper East Side, the setting for raucous parties that
attracted New York’s cultural and intellectual elite: Gloria
Steinem, Norman Mailer, and Andy Warhol, to name a few. For all
its glamour, this was a universe that was neither predictable nor
safe.
With her beloved her living in Southeast Asia, young Ariel was
left to navigate an emotionally perilous landscape alone. It took
four decades before she was able to make sense of the aftershocks
of childhood. Unflinchingly, and with ferocious candor, Leve
trains her writer’s eye on the harrowing circumstances of her
life with (and without) her mother, and transforms the chaos into
art.
In stripped-down, elegant prose, Leve paints an indelible
portrait of her upbringing and the long fight to tunnel her way
out of the darkness. An Abbreviated Life heralds the arrival of a
fearless new voice in the literary firmament.