Review by New York Times Review
THE SELF, a friend once informed me, is an illusion. We were 19 at the time, and he was reading Foucault, but that was 18 years ago, and now he doesn't think he understood Foucault back then. "It's real," my friend says of the self, "but it's made." Whether or not the self is real or an illusion, made or found, we do know that the self we encounter in a book, even if that book is a diary is a made thing. And not every keeper of a diary is capable of creating a self on the page. Many diaries are, in fact, remarkably devoid of any evidence of self I'm thinking, for instance, of the diary of a frontier woman I found in an Iowa archive. Some climate scientists had shown interest in this diary, the archivist told me, because its descriptions of the weather were so thorough. I didn't read that diary, as I already knew, from all my encounters with amateur writing (including my own childhood diary), what it's like to go looking for a self and find only weather. Heidi Julavits once said that keeping a diary when she was young is what made her a writer. Julavits, the author of four novels, revisits that story in the opening pages of her latest work, "The Folded Clock." She tells of returning to her childhood diaries after making that claim, looking for evidence of the writer she would become. "The actual diaries, however, fail to corroborate the myth I'd concocted for myself," she admits. "They reveal me to possess the mind, not of a future writer, but of a future paranoid tax auditor. I exhibited no imagination, no trace of a style, no wit, no personality." With "The Folded Clock," she corrects the record. Keeping a diary may not have made her a writer; but becoming a writer has made it possible for her to produce, now, an exquisite diary. This diary is a diary in the way that Thomas De Quincey's "Confessions of an English Opium Eater" is a confession, or that Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" is a journal, or that Sei Shonagon's "Pillow Book" is a pillow book. Meaning it is, and it isn't. "The Folded Clock" refuses one of the primary conventions of the diary: chronology. The entry for July 16 is followed by Oct. 18, which is followed by June 18. Time moves loosely forward, so that the final entries occur a year or two after the initial entries, but time loops and circles forward. Like Julavits's childhood diaries, every entry in "The Folded Clock" begins, "Today I. ..." As in, "Today I was stung by a wasp," and "Today I heard an ambulance siren," and "Today I tried again to read the Goncourts," and "Today I found a Rolodex in a trash can at J.F.K.," and "Today I thought I might educate my husband about birth control pills," and "Today I heard a terrible noise," and "Today I examined the Rolodex I found at J.F.K." After that first sentence, each today pitches recklessly and headily into the essay it will become, a meditation on desire perhaps, or ghosts, or time. Today does not remain today, but ranges into the past and future, following an associative course guided by an unpredictable mind. The result is that each day feels very full, although little happens. And this fullness becomes a reminder of how a life can be improved by the passing of time. "The Folded Clock" is, among other things, an ode to maturity, or whatever you want to call that effect of time that enables you to understand Foucault now as you did not when you were 19. My Foucault-friend, who is now an anthropologist, observes that in the West we tend to think of made things as being false. We like to imagine that facts are found, not made. And if the story of a life is true, then we have trouble accepting that it might also be crafted. But plots don't just happen to us, we invent them for ourselves. "When writing novels I cannot seem to escape the trap of a plot," Julavits remarks. She finds her escape in "The Folded Clock." It is happily plotless, though it is not without narrative, and certainly not shapeless. The book is structured around reoccurrences of objects, ideas, of signs and symbols that gather meaning each time they return. The intricate structure calls to mind fractal patterns or Renaissance sketches of eddying water, and the real achievement here may be that Julavits manages to make it appear unintentional. The order does not feel made, but found. Wearing, as it does, the guise of a diary, "The Folded Clock" is particularly dependent on the well-crafted persona of its narrator - witty, sly, critical, inventive and adventurous. This is someone who finds an old tap handle so impossibly beautiful, she carries it around in her purse. Who retrieves Rolodexes from trash cans. Who remarks, in a meditation on loss, "Because I lost a necklace in a river I learned that the state of Vermont has a scuba diving club." This is not just a likable self, this is a self who likes herself. Considering that we are, as Americans, rather messed up around the whole concept of self, and that our culture tends to encourage self-loathing, particularly in women, I feel compelled to clarify that there is nothing wrong with a narrator who likes herself. On the contrary. I had the sense, reading "The Folded Clock," that a permission was being granted for which I was grateful. I was reminded, in an elliptical way, of the moment in James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son" when he writes, "I acted in New Jersey as I had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself - I had to act that way - with results that were, simply, unbelievable." Baldwin was performing radical self-regard, and he was punished for it. The situation may be considerably less fraught for Julavits, but I don't admire her self-regard any less. "The whole problem is to establish communication with one's self," Julavits writes, quoting E.B. White. She mentions White almost as frequently as she mentions "The Bachelorette" and slightly more frequently than the tap handle in her purse. Her prose, like White's, is especially liquid, and her sentences are unimpeachable. Julavits is not only a novelist, of course, but also an accomplished essayist. One of the hazards of reading "The Folded Clock" may be its potential to inspire envy. It portrays a rich life. There are summers in Maine and travel to Italy, Germany and Switzerland. There are long swims in the Atlantic. There is a husband who implores, "Please, let's not fight about Hitler." Fortunately, I was spared the discomfort of envying Julavits by, over the course of reading "The Folded Clock," becoming her. "She lost herself to me," Julavits writes of her younger self. And so did I, with great pleasure. Losing one's self is, after all, one of the rewards of reading. The opportunity to inhabit another self, to experience another consciousness, is perhaps the most profound trespass a work of literature can allow. "The Folded Clock" offers all the thrill of that trespass, in a work so artful that it appears to be without artifice. This diary is a record of the interior weather of an adept thinker. In it, the mundane is rendered extraordinary through the alchemy of effortless prose. It is a work in which a self is both lost and found, but above all made. Julavits mentions E.B. White almost as frequently as she mentions 'The Bachelorette.' EULA BISS is the author, most recently, of "On Immunity: An Inoculation."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 29, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
Editor (Women in Clothes, 2014) and novelist (The Vanishers, 2012) Julavits' nifty new memoir, wherein every entry begins with Today I . . . , offers proof positive, as if it were needed, that she is, indeed, a dyed-in-the-wool writer. Quite literally. Because after spilling a drop of ink on her sweater, I stuck the sweater in my mouth. I sucked the ink like it was blood. Yet she protests that the jejune entries in her childhood diaries are evidence that she was not always the writer she once fancied herself. Still, every writer has to begin with what they know, and Julavits knows not only of writing, but also of hot-water tap handles, fatalities due to shark attacks, certain unnamed nineteenth-century French sibling authors, and many, many other things. She shares her fascinations in easy, non-sequential, what-I-did-today essays that cover the amusing and comical toy stethoscopes and how to pee, or not, into an airsick bag as well as the philosophical, including the nature of gift giving. Julavits is thoughtful, imaginative, funny, and always entertaining.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
When Julavits, a novelist (The Vanishers) and founding editor of the Believer magazine, rediscovered the diary she kept as a young girl, she was disappointed by its lack of imagination, style, and wit. So, in her 40s, she set out to chronicle the next two years of her life, complete with all the idiosyncrasies missing from her youthful writings. Displaying both charm and stark honesty, Julavits admits to having an abortion when she was 19, explores the dissolution of her first marriage, and laments the worst sex of her life. Receiving a wasp sting reminds her of the time she was in the window seat on a red-eye flight next to two sleeping passengers. Instead of disturbing them to use the lavatory, she attempted to relieve herself in an airsickness bag. And hearing an ambulance siren or conducting a fruitless Internet search unleashes her neurotic imagination. Each entry begins "Today I," just as she began her diary as a girl. The entries aren't ordered, and many depict Julavits as a not-always-likable woman of privilege. 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. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Starred Review. Aptly titled, this is a collection of diary entries, written over two years, that Julavits, novelist (The Vanishers) and founding editor of the Believer, has selected, revised, and rearranged out of their chronological order. The resulting structure is a seamless narrative describing her life as a woman, wife, mother, and writer. Lyrically written, each entry is a brief but boundless meditation on time, identity, and constructions of selfhood. Julavits is a natural and gifted essayist, and her work is filled with humor, paradox-"I understood that a minute extends far beneath the surface; that it is far deeper than it is wide"-and digressions that give way to brilliant insight. But perhaps most striking is her honesty, and her honest portrayal of herself, which she achieves skillfully, without succumbing to lurid detail or compromising her writer's persona. She remains, even while confessing episodes of deceitfulness or acts of arrogance, impossible not to like. VERDICT Compelling and truly creative, this is a book that the reader will want to return to again and again-in other words, a perfect book. [See Prepub Alert, 10/20/14.]-Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY (c) Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Reflections on being and becoming.Novelist, Guggenheim Fellow and co-founder of the Believer magazine, Julavits (Writing/Columbia Univ.; co-editor, The Vanishers, 2012, etc.), now in her mid-40s, noticed that the smallest unit of time she experiences is no longer a minute, a day, nor even a week, but years. That disquieting perception inspired this book: "Since I am suddenly ten years older than I was, it seems, one year ago, I decided to keep a diary." Time is much on her mind in gently philosophical entries that do not appear chronologically but instead are disrupted and reordered, recounting two years of her life in New York, where she and her husband teach; Maine, where she grew up yearning to leave and now spends joyful summers; and Germany, where the family lived during her husband's fellowship at the American Academy in Berlin. Admitting that she is a "sub-sub-subtextual" reader of the world, Julavits analyzes her marriage; the needs and growing independence of her young son and daughter; her visits to a psychic, with whom she discusses the mystical power of objects and synchronicity ("My life seems marked by a high degree of coincidence and recursion," Julavits confesses); former lovers; her aspirations as a writer; and such guilty pleasures as watching the reality series The Bachelorette, whose "love language" she and her husband gleefully parse. Other pastimes include shopping on eBay, which, she writes, "has immeasurably improved my quality of life more than doctors or drugs"; succumbing to temptation at yard sales; and swimming, despite her overwhelming fear of sharks. Some entries are slyly funny, gossipy and irreverent; others, quietly intimate, reveal recurring depression and anxiety, "alternate states of being" to which she gratefully returns: "When you become you again, you can actually greet yourself. You can welcome yourself back." An inventive, beautifully crafted memoir, wise and insightful. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
