
Critic Reviews
Good
Based on 15 reviews on

A New York Times Notable Book
Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they "revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor." Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life--now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with her trademark humor, honesty, and searing intelligence.Heidi Julavits is also the author of four critically acclaimed novels (The Vanishers, The Uses of Enchantment, The Effect of Living Backwards, and The Mineral Palace) and coeditor, 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.
"Exquisite. . . . A work so artful that it appears to be without artifice." --The New York Times Book Review
"Playful, intimate, and deeply insightful. . . . What you can tell from this book is that [Julavits] is someone you truly want to know--even better than you already do from reading her diary." --Chicago Tribune
"Scathingly funny. . . . An engaging portrait of a woman's sense of identity, which continually shape-shifts with time." --Los Angeles Times
"[A] fascinating quasi-memoir. . . . The humor and the pathos of the book arise from [the] mismatch between the urgency of a decision in the moment and the awareness that always runs beneath it: that time will eventually make most things not matter." --The Washington Post
"A profound meditation on the passing of time." --Entertainment Weekly
"Cleverly crafted [and] thoughtfully entertaining. . . . Julavits's best book yet." --O, The Oprah Magazine
"Poignant." --The Boston Globe
"[Julavits] has a native's eye for the small, sometimes indiscernible quirks that define local behavior. . . . There is glorious slippage, just enough to see its author in the various stages of her life, adhering to the truth as she sees it." --Minneapolis Star Tribune
"[Julavits] takes moments in time and blows them up with thought and introspection and tangential relations. She condenses them down into polished nuggets. . . . Her mind is so smart and delightful and open." --The Rumpus