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3.73 AVERAGE
3.73 AVERAGE
Heidi Julavits is an author I've always felt guilty about not having read sooner. I always see her books in used bookshops and consider picking one up, but am never sure where to begin. One day, at Henderson's, I decided I would do with Heidi Julavits's books what I did with Catherine Lacey's books: start from the most recent one, and work my way backwards. When I looked under the "J's" in the bookshop, searching for "Julavits," I saw the beautifully intricate spine (designed by one of my favorite artists Leanne Shapton) of her more recent book from 2015 entitled "The Folded Clock." I perused the back cover to see what it was about, wondering why it was shelved under "fiction" when it sounded like a memoir. Julavits, often a novelist, wrote The Folded Clock as her first attempt at a memoir-esque book. However, with Heidi Julavits, things are never done conventionally. The Folded Clock is billed as a "diary" and is exactly that, a diary that documents two years of Julavits's life.
When I first saw that this was what The Folded Clock was about, I am loathe to say that my first thought was...why should we care? Julavits is an interesting, accomplished author, but I wasn't sure about how fun it would be to read her diary entries from two years of her life. I was so, so unbelievably wrong. The Folded Clock is a wildly good book and Heidi Julavits is the kind of person I would want to hang out with. I could have read her diary entries for hundreds of pages longer.
The Folded Clock joins a long line of books that touch on "the monotony of daily life," but I feel that this book, so elegantly and beautifully rendered, does it very well. In one of the first entries, Julavits talks about a burgeoning crush she had on a guy who worked in the barn by her studio in Maine. She writes that, "...this crush had no basis in reality or in my imagination; it had so little basis in either realm that I couldn't even fantasize about a next move. He was just a fun reason to go to work each day". This resonated, as I often develop minor crushes with never any intention of acting on them, it's just a way to make a dull existence somewhat more interesting. This is a common theme throughout The Folded Clock: Julavits doing little things to try and make her daily life more exciting. On the flip side, she also reaches points of acceptance of how boring, and often tiring, life can be. Another one of my favorite passages came in the latter half of the book, in which Julavits was talking about feeling annoyed that her kid woke her up in the middle of the night because he was crying. The annoyance, she writes, stems from the fact that, "the day had been too long; there had already been too many phases." She continues on to say that, "There was the cleaning phase, during which I organized lightbulbs ....There was the Enforced Outdoor Fun phase, people dragged unhappily around the harbor on a kayak." I felt this was a meaningful way to discuss a day having been too long. Sometimes certain days have too many phases: you do a lot of stuff, but none of it was very stimulating or fun, so you go home feeling tired and a little bit sad.
Heidi Julavits has a Rachel Cusk-esque way of describing situations, which made me laugh out loud while reading The Folded Clock on multiple occasions. In one scene, Julavits attends a Virginia Woolf reading. She writes that, "For some reason, this reading was held at a law school. At the front desk I was asked by an old woman holding a hand-written sign that said 'Virginia Woolf,' as though she was a chauffeur picking up Virginia Woolf at the airport". I felt the same way reading The Folded Clock that I do when I read work by Rachel Cusk, each experience I have in daily life becomes seen through the lens of Julavits or Cusk, meaning that I'm more remarkably judgmental, and therefore more hilarious. While reading The Folded Clock, I started a game with one of my friends. The game was that each time someone walked into the room, we had to create a sentence in our heads about them that would touch on just how funny and bizarre random strangers can be. Reading the work of Rachel Cusk and Heidi Julavits has solidified the fact that meditative, people-watching books are some of my favorites to read.
One of my favorite things about The Folded Clock, and Heidi Julavits in general, is the fact that Julavits unapologetically owns her "bad" qualities. Never in The Folded Clock is there a half-hearted acknowledgment of her privilege to be found (acknowledgments that, when done by white authors, always feel lousy) and never is there over-the-top self deprecation that feels less genuine and more just a sad attempt to be funny. Julavits writes her unfiltered truth in The Folded Clock, and it makes for an extremely authentic book.
All of this being said, one might not enjoy The Folded Clock if they don't enjoy narration by Heidi Julavits. You will know right from the beginning if this book will be for you, and if you don't connect with Julavits or her style, you may find this to be boring or irritating. However, if you are a fan of the scalpel that writers like Rachel Cusk, Lauren Oyler, and Catherine Lacey take to the weirdness of modern life, you will love The Folded Clock.
When I first saw that this was what The Folded Clock was about, I am loathe to say that my first thought was...why should we care? Julavits is an interesting, accomplished author, but I wasn't sure about how fun it would be to read her diary entries from two years of her life. I was so, so unbelievably wrong. The Folded Clock is a wildly good book and Heidi Julavits is the kind of person I would want to hang out with. I could have read her diary entries for hundreds of pages longer.
The Folded Clock joins a long line of books that touch on "the monotony of daily life," but I feel that this book, so elegantly and beautifully rendered, does it very well. In one of the first entries, Julavits talks about a burgeoning crush she had on a guy who worked in the barn by her studio in Maine. She writes that, "...this crush had no basis in reality or in my imagination; it had so little basis in either realm that I couldn't even fantasize about a next move. He was just a fun reason to go to work each day". This resonated, as I often develop minor crushes with never any intention of acting on them, it's just a way to make a dull existence somewhat more interesting. This is a common theme throughout The Folded Clock: Julavits doing little things to try and make her daily life more exciting. On the flip side, she also reaches points of acceptance of how boring, and often tiring, life can be. Another one of my favorite passages came in the latter half of the book, in which Julavits was talking about feeling annoyed that her kid woke her up in the middle of the night because he was crying. The annoyance, she writes, stems from the fact that, "the day had been too long; there had already been too many phases." She continues on to say that, "There was the cleaning phase, during which I organized lightbulbs ....There was the Enforced Outdoor Fun phase, people dragged unhappily around the harbor on a kayak." I felt this was a meaningful way to discuss a day having been too long. Sometimes certain days have too many phases: you do a lot of stuff, but none of it was very stimulating or fun, so you go home feeling tired and a little bit sad.
Heidi Julavits has a Rachel Cusk-esque way of describing situations, which made me laugh out loud while reading The Folded Clock on multiple occasions. In one scene, Julavits attends a Virginia Woolf reading. She writes that, "For some reason, this reading was held at a law school. At the front desk I was asked by an old woman holding a hand-written sign that said 'Virginia Woolf,' as though she was a chauffeur picking up Virginia Woolf at the airport". I felt the same way reading The Folded Clock that I do when I read work by Rachel Cusk, each experience I have in daily life becomes seen through the lens of Julavits or Cusk, meaning that I'm more remarkably judgmental, and therefore more hilarious. While reading The Folded Clock, I started a game with one of my friends. The game was that each time someone walked into the room, we had to create a sentence in our heads about them that would touch on just how funny and bizarre random strangers can be. Reading the work of Rachel Cusk and Heidi Julavits has solidified the fact that meditative, people-watching books are some of my favorites to read.
One of my favorite things about The Folded Clock, and Heidi Julavits in general, is the fact that Julavits unapologetically owns her "bad" qualities. Never in The Folded Clock is there a half-hearted acknowledgment of her privilege to be found (acknowledgments that, when done by white authors, always feel lousy) and never is there over-the-top self deprecation that feels less genuine and more just a sad attempt to be funny. Julavits writes her unfiltered truth in The Folded Clock, and it makes for an extremely authentic book.
All of this being said, one might not enjoy The Folded Clock if they don't enjoy narration by Heidi Julavits. You will know right from the beginning if this book will be for you, and if you don't connect with Julavits or her style, you may find this to be boring or irritating. However, if you are a fan of the scalpel that writers like Rachel Cusk, Lauren Oyler, and Catherine Lacey take to the weirdness of modern life, you will love The Folded Clock.
I loved this book. I have no reason for why it took me over a month to read this book, except that Ai saw some part of myself in each vignette, and that experience was so rich that I had to nibble on it like a truffle.
informative
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
How unassuming is a diary? It is the form that most teenage girls take to, and thus, carrying no pretensions of art, it is the perfect form for surprising us with art. This is not the confessional tell-all feelings-fest that you think it is. Or at least that's not all it is. It definitely plays with concepts of confessional, tell-all, and feelings. She goes there, but not without a lot of self-conscious humor and a lot of subversive play.
Time and the self are both deconstructed, and what is a diary if not the intersection between the self and time?
These pieces do start off with a date and time, though even that time is complicated by a seemingly randomized order of the dates. And once she starts with those same words ("Today I...") she moves in unexpected ways into memories and wishes and dreams the way a person thinks, but also turning her attention to the way she herself thinks, i.e. the thinker thinking upon thinking. Much of this thinking is about the self and the construction of the self, how our selves and our motives are often contradictory, hypocritical, and self serving. But not in any of those words, that would be a bore... on the surface it just looks like she's talking about watching reality TV with her husband.
There's a lot of overlap with Lydia Davis in here, except that where Davis is more obviously stylized and concerned with language and linguistics, Julavits is more concerned with the idea of "honesty" which is almost always a moving target, and perhaps gains a strange new non-meaning in the context of a diary written expressly for publication (ha!). It seems to me that her protagonist, for she very obviously is her own constructed fiction here no matter how much she shares in common with the person she writes down on the page, is involved in a complex multi-layered heist in which she fools us into believing something that she fools herself into writing.
And throughout, we (she and I) are having so much sneaky fun! Who cares if we're being really clever about it, we're also laughing the whole way there. The places she goes with this simple "Today I..." prompt is sometimes surprising, and almost always more interesting than what actually happened on that day. Sometimes she ends up with a morsel of wisdom, but more often than not she ends up in a place of profound uncertainty. Where there are no answers, but the question seems very well posed.
Some have criticized her for writing about a life of privilege. She writes about artist colonies in Italy and staying in Maine for the summer, and online shopping and watching the Bachelor, etc. But she writes about things in such a self-mocking way half of the time, it doesn't seem offensive to me. She realizes she's privileged! But she can't help it! Would you rather she (as a privileged woman) pretend to be slumming it and write about how hard life is? Now that would be an interesting premise for a subversion of "honesty".
For me, this was a solid 5 stars, but docked back half a star because it went on just a tad too long, and I started to drift. Maybe 50-100 pages could have been cut.
Time and the self are both deconstructed, and what is a diary if not the intersection between the self and time?
These pieces do start off with a date and time, though even that time is complicated by a seemingly randomized order of the dates. And once she starts with those same words ("Today I...") she moves in unexpected ways into memories and wishes and dreams the way a person thinks, but also turning her attention to the way she herself thinks, i.e. the thinker thinking upon thinking. Much of this thinking is about the self and the construction of the self, how our selves and our motives are often contradictory, hypocritical, and self serving. But not in any of those words, that would be a bore... on the surface it just looks like she's talking about watching reality TV with her husband.
There's a lot of overlap with Lydia Davis in here, except that where Davis is more obviously stylized and concerned with language and linguistics, Julavits is more concerned with the idea of "honesty" which is almost always a moving target, and perhaps gains a strange new non-meaning in the context of a diary written expressly for publication (ha!). It seems to me that her protagonist, for she very obviously is her own constructed fiction here no matter how much she shares in common with the person she writes down on the page, is involved in a complex multi-layered heist in which she fools us into believing something that she fools herself into writing.
And throughout, we (she and I) are having so much sneaky fun! Who cares if we're being really clever about it, we're also laughing the whole way there. The places she goes with this simple "Today I..." prompt is sometimes surprising, and almost always more interesting than what actually happened on that day. Sometimes she ends up with a morsel of wisdom, but more often than not she ends up in a place of profound uncertainty. Where there are no answers, but the question seems very well posed.
Some have criticized her for writing about a life of privilege. She writes about artist colonies in Italy and staying in Maine for the summer, and online shopping and watching the Bachelor, etc. But she writes about things in such a self-mocking way half of the time, it doesn't seem offensive to me. She realizes she's privileged! But she can't help it! Would you rather she (as a privileged woman) pretend to be slumming it and write about how hard life is? Now that would be an interesting premise for a subversion of "honesty".
For me, this was a solid 5 stars, but docked back half a star because it went on just a tad too long, and I started to drift. Maybe 50-100 pages could have been cut.
This is my kind of book. I need to re-check out or buy a copy, because I didn't get a chance to write down my favorite lines.
I had this book saved in my camera roll as a book that was recommended and interesting. Everywhere I read said they couldn't put this book down, it was so interesting etc. I will say, this isn't a book I would normally opt to read. It's a very different genre then what I would normally go for. However, the first 30 pages I would say were interesting, and that's where it stopped for me. I literally could NOT force myself to finish this book. It was so incredibly boring and seemed so repetitive. I still don't even understand the point of this book, unless I missed it. I felt like it had no point and I couldn't relate to anything she was saying and half the time I had no idea what she was even talking about. I know it's a "diary" and the entries are random but still. I would never recommend this book and I'm unsure as to why it was so hyped up between multiple sites I read. I borrowed this book from an online library and am so very happy I didn't waste money on this.
This is a not a four-star book from start to finish; it drags occasionally and then is interrupted by what feel like bright spots of insight.
Julavits jokes in it that she should publish a book of her email correspondence, as she really shines there and after reading the Folded Clock I can imagine she's right.
Despite its flaws, the format of this book was interesting enough to be recommended - just be patient when it gets momentarily dull.
Julavits jokes in it that she should publish a book of her email correspondence, as she really shines there and after reading the Folded Clock I can imagine she's right.
Despite its flaws, the format of this book was interesting enough to be recommended - just be patient when it gets momentarily dull.
heidi julavits' diary, of sorts, from a slivered section of her life. excellent and weird and penetrating and sometimes petty. felt strange moments of empathy, and also moments of complete disconnect while reading. her voice made me think of a more contemporary and settled iteration of shirley jackson's from LIFE AMONG THE SAVAGES. i'm not sure why i like a lot of the personal writing of authors whose fiction i didn't particularly enjoy. perhaps it is some imagined greater degree of honesty that strikes me. or maybe the exhilaration that comes from a conditional invitation to tromp around inside a whole other person's head.
I appreciate the structure of this "diary," which intermixes three distinct periods of the author's life in a single year, with lots of memories from the past as a large part of the streams. But it doesn't all hang together for me with the satisfaction I'd like.
I have to admit that short stories is not my favorite genre and this felt like a lot of very short stories to me. I was confused that the author essentially chose to fabricate a journal because her childhood journals fell short. I was also confused at the non linear nature of the journal and failed to find what the sequence or thread was from beginning to end. The author writes very well and some of the stories were amusing, but ultimately the book fell short for me.