From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Staff Pick
The Folded Clock is less a diary and more a collection of micro-essays. Part rambling monologue, part stream of consciousness, it is a lovely and engaging reflection on adult relationships of all forms. It will have you reaching for your old diaries or starting a new one. Recommended By Bry H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of one year in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits.
Like many young girls, Heidi Julavits wrote in her diary every day. Years later, she found her old diaries, hoping to find proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor." The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity. Reading these lines from her past self, writes Julavits, "I want to good-naturedly laugh at this person. I want to but I can't. What she wanted then is scarcely different from what I want today."
Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, sex and marriage, childhood and parenting, art and ambition, regret and pleasure. In keeping with the spirit of a diary, the tone is confessional, sometimes shockingly so, as the focus shifts from whom she wants to be to whom she may have become. Unlike her childhood diary the order is not chronological, but instead guided by the dictates of events that trigger memory and reflection — a small-town parade, trying to flirt her way out of a traffic ticket, asking her husband if her new sunglasses are flattering.
What elevates the book above an exercise in self-absorption is Julavits's raucous sense of humor about her foibles and misadventures. The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters.
Review
“[S]cathingly funny…. [O]ddly exhilarating…. Julavits, as we know from her inventive novels…is a pro at spinning stories.” Los Angeles Times
Review
“Display[s] both charm and stark honesty… The diary angle makes
for a clever hook, but masks what this really is — a compelling collection
of intimate, untitled personal essays that reveal one woman’s
ever-evolving soul.” Publishers Weekly
Review
“Reflections on being and becoming… Some entries are slyly funny, gossipy and irreverent; others, quietly intimate… An inventive, beautifully crafted memoir, wise and insightful.”
Kirkus Reviews (Starred)
About the Author
Heidi Julavits is the author of four critically acclaimed novels: The Vanishers, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and The Best American Short Stories, among other places. She's a founding editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in Manhattan and Maine.