Folded Clock

An insightful meditation on time, relationships and identity, The Folded Clock is a funny, thoughtful and inquisitive diary for fans of Olivia Laing and Jenny OffillLike many young people, Heidi Julavits kept a diary. Decades later she found her old diaries in a storage bin, and hoped to discover the early evidence of the person (and writer) she’d since become. Instead, they 'revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor'.Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a fortysomething 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, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition.The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in the English language.

Exquisite ... 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 ... Witty, sly, critical, inventive and adventurous ... 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, A work of finely tuned artifice, an unashamed performance of privacy ... By the end you come to realise that this is a work of careful, conscious assembly - a life told in tessellated pieces, fitting perfectly together ... Julavits acts as the expert tour guide to her own anxious, fizzing mind ... Revelatory, Julavits is a brilliant craftsman ... Intimate, insightful and very entertaining, this is a singular delight *****, Scathingly funny ... Exhilarating ... An engaging portrait of a woman's sense of identity, Blurs the lines between contemplation and revelation, fact and fiction ... Julavits takes the novel approach of reinventing the form of the diary ... Reveals a whole lot, in often-flawless prose, about motherhood, time, petty jealousies, grand debates, and the irresistible attractions of The Bachelorette

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) and co-editor, with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes. Her fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine, McSweeney’s, 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, where she teaches at Columbia University. She was born and raised in Portland, Maine.