Folded Clock (Julavits)

Book Reviews
[Julavits] tells of returning to her childhood diaries…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…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…[Julavits's] prose…is especially liquid, and her sentences are unimpeachable…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.
Eula Bliss - New York Times Book Review


[A] well-written, sometimes entertaining, occasionally irritating portrait of an intelligent and accomplished woman struggling with identity and aging.... Each day describes an event...which over time reveal Julavits’s life: childhood in Maine, desperate to escape; infatuation with the lives of wealthy college peers; entering the New York literary scene; an erroneous first and successful second marriage; and professional success, which leaves her raggedly busy, missing her children, and yearning for her summers back in Maine.... [H]er search for identity, fear of time passing, and sense of her own aging can be poignant.
Rebecca Steinitz - Boston Globe


The Folded Clock replaces slavish chronological record-keeping with a playfulness that allows Julavits to thumb her nose at time. For starters, she scrambles the sequence of dates...with no identifying years attached. The lovely title...suggests a Dali-esque image of hours and days folding in on themselves to disappear altogether.... Julavits, as we know from her inventive novels...is a pro at spinning stories.... The Folded Clock is an engaging portrait of a woman's sense of identity, which continually shape-shifts with time. In her mid-40s, Julavits says she is "looking for the next age I will be."
Heller McAlpin - Los Angeles Times


[A] cleverly crafted, thoughtfully entertaining series of meditations on personhood and culture.... complex and captivating.... [Julavits] raises the questions, How do we curate our own lives when everything about them may wind up in print? Can we ever expect naked truth from a diary, or do we invariably receive a sanitized version? Maybe, Julavits's work suggests, the best we can hope for is a deeply mediated honesty—for words are always equal parts mask and revelation
Lydia Millet, O Magazine


[B]lur[s] the lines between contemplation and revelation, fact and fiction.... Julavits takes the novel approach of reinventing the form of the diary.... Julavits reveals a whole lot, in often-flawless prose, about motherhood, time, petty jealousies, grand debates, and the irresistible attractions of The Bachelorette (“8 Books You Need to Read This April”).
New York Magazine


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


(Starred review.) [A] seamless narrative describing [Julavits's] 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. —Meagan Lacy, Guttman Community Coll., CUNY
Library Journal


(Starred 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