Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a series of metaphors and similes from Ariel Levy…
As a lifelong fan of memoir, I was intrigued when I heard the backstory of a book by Ariel Levy, (pictured above). A staff writer for the New Yorker, Levy lost her newly-born son at 19 weeks while traveling alone in Mongolia. Her book addresses this horrific story along with details about her affair, her spouse’s alcoholism, and their eventual divorce.
Her book, The Rules Do Not Apply, also offered some spectacular figurative language. Here are my favourite examples:
- As we reached our thirtieth birthdays, my friends and I were like kernels of popcorn exploding in a pot: First one, then another, and pretty soon we were all bursting into matrimony.
- A pricking adrenaline went through me as if I were witnessing a disaster in progress, a fire devouring the curtains, rather than the mundane reality of another person’s inebriation.
- The sleeping almonds of his eyes.
- There was something wrong with the Lucy who’d picked me up at JFK. Her eyes were untenanted.
- I saw him under my closed eyelids like an imprint from the sun.
- Grief is a world you walk through skinned, unshelled.
- Soon it is Christmastime. New York City is cold and elegant and the white lights on the stone buildings are like jewelry on a stately dame.
An earlier version of this post first appeared on my blog on Dec. 6/18.
