In Levy's profiles, her subjects come to life in a brilliant, sensorily complete way we don't just come to understand the way Ephron thinks and works, we see how Ephron exists in the world: 'When she is sitting, Ephron folds in on herself-she crosses her legs and holds her chin in her hand-and becomes very compact, a little origami of a person.' Her ability to tell someone else's story appears born out of a genuine curiosity about others' lives her writing is singularly lucid. On staff at The New Yorker for almost a decade now, and a writer for New York Magazine for years before that, Ariel Levy has written notable profiles on everyone from South African athlete Caster Semenya to right-wing Christian politician Mike Huckabee and iconic writer Nora Ephron. But Levy was, as she'd be the first to tell you, left with some things still chief among them, her ability to write. This type of loss can seem too much to bear, and sometimes it is. In one fell swoop, Levy had lost her child, her wife, her house all key elements of the person she had worked to become, all parts of a life she had intentionally created. Is it darkening or growing lighter? And does it even matter what color the void is? When once she had been sure of the direction in which her life was heading, straight and strong as an arrow, over the course of mere days, her certainty vanished the arrow arced up and into the kind of wide open sky that's hard to accurately assess. Where once she had been married, a homeowner, five-months pregnant, and on her way to motherhood, in one swift rush, she.

Within the span of a handful of weeks, almost every identifiable structure in Ariel Levy's life was summarily dismantled.

Ariel levy the rules don t apply