Loss is the black hole at the centre of Ariel Levy’s maelstrom of a memoir. The events of her life surge around this absence, and loss is the centrifugal force – not just loss of love (though love goes), or of hope, though that too, but loss of her sense of self as a ceaseless, marvellous act of becoming.

Levy is a fearless, original journalist, now on the New Yorker, and she uses these same qualities to scrutinise her own life, reporting its formation and unravelling. From the time she was a clever, vigilant girl growing up in “clean, leafy” Westchester, New York, she had believed that normal rules did not apply to her, until she found that, after all, of course, they did: grief comes to us all. She believed nothing bad could happen to her in the “movie of her life”, because she was its scriptwriter and protagonist. She believed she could be free and in perpetual motion. Then she lost her baby, her spouse, her home, and she fell into the desolation she had held at bay, which had held her at bay. The woman who exhilaratingly thought she could have everything finds herself with nothing.

Levy has specialised in stories about “women who are too much”. She too, she admits, is too much. Feminism offered women “the lavish gift of agency” and Levy grabbed it. Her life has been adventurous and, to some, controversial. She has taken risks, been greedy, carnal, ambitious (“it was unseemly how successful I felt”), intoxicated by desires (“the sparkle of one’s ego, pumped full of bubbles by another’s ardour”). She has loved both men and women – the addictive, destructive affair that brought her world crashing down was with her ex-girlfriend, now transitioned to a man: irresistible to a woman wanting to “kick the door off its hinges”. (In this phrase, and in Levy’s bold project of declassification, the ghost of Virginia Woolf is conjured up.)

But it is always possibility, not controversy, that Levy seeks. She is endlessly trying on different selves: life is a movie, a novel, a carnival, a performance, a battleground; her betrayal feeds her “smutty daydream” of being “gorgeous, treacherous, lascivious, damned”. She talks to herself (this memoir is perhaps a conversation between her “competent” and her “bewildered” self; in the very first sentence, when she addresses “you”, the reader, she is also addressing herself). Fear hides in plain sight, masquerading as folly.

She writes in order to make a narrative out of the chaos she creates, so that she is simultaneously in control and out of it. When she travels, she feels both reckless and afraid, always on the lonely brink – and indeed there is a sense of brinkmanship in everything she does. It’s no wonder that she falls in love with the story of the “breathtakingly butch” South African runner Caster Semenya, whose gender was brought under public scrutiny, because through Semenya she can ask: “What in the end is a woman?”

In keeping with her febrile nature, Levy’s prose is dynamic, molten with verbs and with images of light, movement and change. In the first few pages, I found “fuming”, “crackling”, “electrifying”, “thrilling”, “zooming”, “exploded”, “vortex”, “dazzled”…. She writes of “the glory”, the “gleam”, of “transcendence”, of “hurtling … up” to things. In her 20s, she and her friends are like “kernels of popcorn”, exploding in life’s pot. The sheer excitement of being alive is also the excitement of language – of making meanings, spinning tales, being one’s own author and writing one’s own life. What she dreads is to be “old, weakened, wizened”, to be “muffled and grey” in the meaningless march towards death.

Levy calls herself a witch. Her wife, Lucy, is “summoned out of darkness” to stand before the author, like a radiant sunflower, and Levy thinks she will perhaps be saved, enabled to come to a halt in a place she can call home, to be a wife and mother, her next untried self.

But the sorceress becomes the “ruined witch”, carrying death. Although Levy gets pregnant, Lucy’s alcoholism and her own adultery are gradually wrecking their marriage. When she is five months pregnant, she travels on an assignment to Mongolia (“Are you insane?” asked a friend). Dispassionately, with the lack of self-pity that characterises her work, she describes how she goes into premature labour on a lavatory floor. It’s like a scene in a film, back-lit and intensely vivid. Her son is born, tiny and pink and flawless and unsustainable. Lying there, blood gushing from her, Levy is awestruck and transfixed. She kisses his silky forehead. For a fragment of her life, she was someone’s mother. And then she was no one’s mother, no one’s wife, homeless and wrecked. But those 10 or 20 minutes of “black magic” and the gorgeous terror of unconditional love send her into a new world of grief where she walks “unshelled”.

Memoirs are popular at the moment, challenging the traditional, less mobile biography. Levy’s is a breathtakingly good example of how this form can be deft, light-footed and audacious. She flings herself back and forward in time; undermines herself. “Me me me me me,” she mocks at one point. But while she is unflinching in exposing her own mistakes, “that stack up until they block out the sun”, Levy’s book is not a cautionary tale. The trailblazing reporter Maureen Dowd once said to her that “everybody doesn’t get everything”, and in the adrift aftermath of Levy’s trauma, I thought this might be The Rules Do Not Apply’s sobering lesson: that women who are too much get punished in the end.

But no. Levy starts her memoir on a question and she ends it on one, or three: “What first? What else? What next?” She’s picking herself up, going back into the maelstrom: too much, wanting more.

•The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy is published by Penguin (£16.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99