The Folded Clock

February 2, 2015
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.

Starred review from January 15, 2015
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.

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April 15, 2015
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 comicaltoy stethoscopes and how to pee, or not, into an airsick bagas well as the philosophical, including the nature of gift giving. Julavits is thoughtful, imaginative, funny, and always entertaining.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

November 15, 2014

Discovering her childhood diaries, well-regarded author and Believer founding editor Julavits (e.g., The Vanishers) determined to take her confessions to the page again as a woman in her forties. The entries aren't chronological but are inspired by events that cause a chain reaction of meditations on youth, aging, sex, marriage, parenting, and more. Reportedly funny and frank.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from March 1, 2015

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

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.