An Abbreviated Life: A Memoir by Ariel Leve: book review

An Abbreviated Life (2016) is the memoir of a Ariel Leve’s childhood in a dysfunctional family from the 1960s to the present time.

Leve begins her memoir at six years old when her nanny died next to her, on a plane travelling from Bangkok, where her father Harvey lived, to Manhattan, New York, where she lived with her mother Suzanne. Suzanne and Harvey are pseudonyms for her famous parents.

Her classmates adored Leve’s eccentric, artistic, poet mother. But at home, her mother oscillated between extreme affection and extreme rage. She was a controversial attention-seeker, and a distant, critical mother. For Ariel Leve ‘to cope, in childhood, was to be on guard at all times … the result was to live a life within brackets. An abbreviated life.’

Her mother was most at peace when she was talking about literature and poetry. ‘Each book was a friend who would never let her down … Poems were lovers who would never leave.’

Written when the author is nearing 50, it was a cathartic way of ousting the demons. Leve didn’t intend to publish it. It is written in short sentence and phrases. Choppy. But full of key rememberences.

The times in Bangkok and Bali with her father are the author’s happier times. The language changes; the imagery changes. The sentences are longer and more evocative. She was, in her words, ‘at ease and content.’ Athough episodic, the time with her father’s ‘solid and true’ love left a ‘footprint’ on her psyche.

Leve writes of her own psychotic episodes and her eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) treatment—‘a neurological do-over.’ It took decades to comes to terms with the past.

Ariel Leve describes her chaotic childhood through a series of episodes, rather than chronologically. Yet it stresses the continual anxiety, the roller-coaster lives on Manhattan and Bangkok, and the key turning points in a way that is more factual than emotional. It is an easy read, but a poignant read.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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