Normal People Dont Live Like This, Dylan Landis
Normal People Dont Live Like This, Dylan Landis
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Normal People Don't Live Like This
Deluxe Edition

Author: Dylan Landis

Series: Rainey Royal Cycle

Narrator: Sophie Amoss

Unabridged: 6 hr 14 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 04/14/2026

Synopsis

At the center of this startling fiction debut is Leah Levinson, a teen at sea in the anonymous ordeals of a middle-class upbringing on the Upper West Side in the 1970s. In ten installments, written from varying perspectives, we witness her uneasy relationships with faster, looser peers—girls she is drawn to but also alienated by. No one, though, alienates Leah more than her mother, Helen. Estranged yet intertwined, they struggle within the confines of their personalities, unaware of how similar their paths are. Just when they seem at a lonely impasse, each makes an impulsive change—Leah taking a risky trip abroad, Helen renting a secret room in a welfare hotel. Jolted from their old patterns, the two of them independently glimpse the possibility of a more hopeful life. “Nothing pleases and startles a reader like a well done short story, and in Normal People Don't Live Like This, debut author Dylan Landis provides 10 of them, each a star turn. Landis knows when to be dreamy, and she knows when to be sharp, a perfect match for her themes of female desire, the quest for knowledge. [Her] precisely observed women are on the verge of everything, capable of anything.”—Susan Larson, New Orleans Times Picayune

About Dylan Landis

Dylan Landis is
the author of Normal People Don’t Live like This, a work of fiction that
made it onto Newsday’s “10 Favorite Books of 2009” and More magazine’s “100 Books Every Woman Must Read.” She received a 2010 National Endowment
for the Arts Fellowship in Prose, and her work has appeared in Tin House,
Bomb, House Beautiful,
and the New York Times.
In a past life she wrote six books on interior design.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on August 24, 2010

This book is beautiful and agonizing. Dylan Landis writes from the poetic heart of female adolescence, and it matters not a whit that no teenager (that I can imagine) would have the technical virtuosity to articulate the fear, the longing, the anxious insecurities, the love, and the loathing that he......more

Goodreads review by Jhoanna on October 12, 2009

Holy friggin' crap. I knew this book was going to be good after I heard Landis read an excerpt in NYC. Happily, she delivers. And delivers. And delivers. A novel in stories, Normal People Don't Live Like This is painfully arresting, filled with characters who practically hum with heartache and longi......more

Goodreads review by Liz on January 12, 2010

Meh, I suppose it's sort of arty but it skips around & I don't get it. Why doesn't the mom eat? What happened to the dad? How did the mom end up in a boarding house? How did the girl end up in California? It was all so random & I didn't like any of the characters.......more

Goodreads review by Charlie on January 13, 2025

This book was exactly what I needed. It is so beautifully written and has that special charm that truly feels like an escape from this world. I love how the characters and stories are so malleable — this could have been set in any decade and it would have fit. I love timeless reads!......more

Goodreads review by Hayden on June 14, 2020

This is a sneaky little book. I loved the first chapter and enjoyed the rest enough. But by the end of it (and the last chapter-of-sorts is a masterpiece, by the way) I was fully convinced of Leah Levinson's corporeality. I fully expect to bump into her on the streets, someday, when we're able to wal......more

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