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    The Folded Clock
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    The Folded Clock
    Unavailable
    The Folded Clock
    Audiobook9 hours

    The Folded Clock

    Written by Heidi Julavits

    Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Like 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, 'The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a paranoid tax auditor.' The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity. After reading the confessions of her past self, writes Julavits, 'I want to good-naturedly laugh at this person. I want to but I can't. What she wanted then is scarcely different from what I want today.' Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. The dazzling result is The Folded Clock, in which the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDreamscape Media Audio
    Release dateApr 21, 2015
    ISBN9781633798236
    Unavailable
    The Folded Clock
    Author

    Heidi Julavits

    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.

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    Reviews for The Folded Clock

    3.5/5

    53 ratings12 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Well written- a book about a writer! But she can write!
    • 4/5
      The candidness is refreshing, the profundity takes one by surprise. Quite wonderful in terms of style.
    • 4/5
      Written in a diary format this book is funny and engaging. It is like reading ones interior honest and maybe neurotic thoughts that rarely end up being spoken.
    • 3/5
      I thought I would like this book and actually thought I might love it. I am a fan of her other books and it is the type of book I gravitate to. Smart, funny woman who writes about her day, about the minutia that makes up the "stuff of life and what it was like for her. At times I laughed, at times I thought "yes, I want to talk to talk to her about this" and "what good company she is" so I was surprised that halfway through the book I became bored and began to skim through it. Finally, I put it down. I just stopped being interested. Thank you to Edelweiss for allowing me to review this book.
    • 3/5
      A hit and miss mix-tape of observations, Julavits uses the form well, but I wasn't sure (as a baseline) how funny or serious or canonical each entry was supposed to be. Certainly clever enough to warrant a read.
    • 3/5
      I would actually probably give this book 3.5 stars. I really loved Julavits's sense of humor and honesty, and I loved the sometimes seemingly nonlinear turns her journal entries would take before circling back and bringing her tangents all back to one main point. she wrote in a way that I often find myself thinking....one thing reminds me of another, which makes me think about that thing, and then maybe even another thing before remembering the first thing that I was focused on.

      I also appreciated the way she was so honest about her own thoughts and life, even the thoughts that most of us would be ashamed or embarrassed to admit to another person. I liked that she didn't try to hide those things.

      one thing that I did find myself getting slightly irritated by was her references to famous artists/writers/poets/actors, etc without saying WHO they were, even in cases where it honestly couldn't have mattered. one example of this is when she read a biography of a particular famous person right after reading a memoir of the same person. these are both clearly published books...why couldn't we know who she was speaking of? that was a minor irritation, though.

      Overall, I enjoyed Julavits's unique and yet relatable daily journals. I also liked how she didn't leave the diary entries in chronological order. the jumping around kept things interesting, and if was nice to find yourself circling back to something mentioned in a previous entry.
    • 4/5
      Smart, funny and engaging - this is like stumbling across a whole bunch of wonderful short (one-sided) conversations. I'm definitely going to chase up some of Julavits fiction now.
    • 5/5
      Loved this book - it's unlike any book I've read, as it's sort of a diary, but not really, and out of order. It seems to take place over several years, set in Maine, New York, and Europe. Beautifully, meditatively written. Toward the end her style became a little repetitive, but I still loved it. Wish I could write like that.
    • 3/5
      This is a collection of stuff from Heidi Julavits' diary. The most interesting writings here, to me, are those that either deal with her writing on sexuality and sex, or that which deal with everyday-meets-bizarre stuff.

      I wasn't expecting anything before reading this, yet while reading, I seldom chuckled (a good thing, really), sometimes showed others quotes and mostly, I quickly read through the entries, that basically weren't for me. The best I can say about those entries, is that they weren't attention seeking. I can't remember much of this collection, but was left with an OK feeling and a little sense of needing Montaigne afterwards.
    • 3/5
      3.5 "Today I wondered 'What is the worth of a day?'" An intriguing first line and one that strikes a personal note, when I think of the ways we measure our time and accomplishments. The "Today I..." motif repeats as this diary by Julavits spans 2 years of her life: alternating between time in NYC, her primary home; Maine, her summer home; and Germany where her husband was attending a foreign policy summit for a couple months. Time is fluid in this diary, with dates skipping all around, which took me a little while to pick up on in the audio version. I thought I accidentally had my playlist on shuffle! But I think that is part of her point -- we tend not to reflect chronologically. I was torn between admiration for some of her creative observations and flights of fancy (no wonder she is a writer if she can spin a whole riff on buying something at the store!) and irritation for how involved some potential (yet nonexistent!) scenarios spun off into neurotic worrying and anxiousness. Her life is definitely not dull -- she travels with her husband and children and includes some of these adventures, but it is her interior life that is so rich. Mundane takes on meaning which isn't a bad way to think for awhile.
    • 3/5
      May 7Today I begin reading the new book by an author I adore. It's a non-fiction work in diary format, a departure from the author's normal tales. I look forward to my time in these pages. How often have I wanted to better know an artist whose work I love? This is my chance. I feel I am being invited to the author's residence for coffee and am allowed to ask anything. What insight will this author have? What are her deepest fears and most unspoken desires? What is she like when she isn't “being a writer”? I'm about to find out. June 23Today I finished trudging through the book I started last month. While my opinion of the author's talents regarding writing has not changed, my opinion of the author herself most definitely has. I had stated that I felt like I was being invited to the author's residence for coffee; I was wrong. While reading this book—this diary—I was transported to the author's residence, but it was for a formal dinner party, the kind where you feel awkward the entire time, wondering if everyone is staring at you because you put your fork down at the wrong angle on your plate. But no one at this party was paying me any attention, because the author was the center of the show. That's okay. It's what I expected. I wanted to know more about her. But what I'd hoped for was an intelligent conversation full of insight, humor, and heart. What I got instead was an intelligently-written drunken tirade. You know the dinner party where the hostess holds her wine glass at an angle and tells you about the time she urinated in a plane's airsickness bag and constantly reminds you how she's happy and stable? How she's glad she cheated on her first husband with her second, but keeps bringing it up every few minutes as if it haunts her? How she's proud to teach her eight-year-old daughter how to look more “fuckable”? How life is great because she spends the summer in Maine *sip* the winter in New York *sip* how she's been to Italy *sip* Germany *sip* France *sip* Morocco *sip*? That's the dinner party I just came home from.I feel bad saying such things, because I really do appreciate this author's talent. While others have bashed her fiction (her four major works of fiction average a rating of 3.08 on Goodreads), called her writing juvenile and stilted, and written her off as an untalented hack, I have stood by her side. I have defended her brilliance. Ironically, it is this most recent work that maintains a rating that borders four stars. Apparently, I am in the minority.What is it about this diary that others love? Is it the anecdote-laden short passages that are about nothing and everything? Is it the gossip? Is it the extravagant lifestyle? The constant abandon the author shows? Or the author's curious love of the reality television show, The Bachelor? Whatever it is, I want none of it.I think what irritated me most is how the author repeatedly mentioned her woes and talked about her inability to buy things she wanted. In fact, a huge chunk of this book is about eBay shopping. When combined with her many mentions of her foreign travels and her dinner parties with elite artists, this book seems to be about the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Maybe the author wishes for more than second-hand Internet shopping. Maybe travels to Europe are not enough. But as someone who knows what “starving artist” means, as someone who gave up full-time employment and security to write a novel and stay home with my kids, as someone who can't afford a vacation outside of the state of Kansas, and as someone who saves and saves and saves in order to buy $50 shoes from Famous Footwear, I find the author's complaints about $500 boots repulsive. There are much bigger concerns in the world, but the writer seems unaware or uncaring.I hope the writer can forgive me. I did love the cadence and beauty of many of the sentences in this work. Maybe there is some brilliance in the parallel drawn between the juvenile diary of an adolescent girl and the juvenile diary of a middle-aged woman. I am still a fan. But my dearest author, I do not wish to be your friend. I hope you will continue to write many wonderful works of fiction, but please do not invite me again for a dinner party. I will come to your readings. I will continue to defend your novels. But friends we cannot be. And please know that your confusion of the Library of Congress classification with Dewey Decimal is unforgivable. For everything else, I'll accept apology in the form of a new novel.
    • 5/5
      What a great book! It's a diary, although the years are not specified and the dates are not consecutive.  

      Each of the entries starts "Today I ..." and what follows is a riff and whatever it was she did or thought on that day - almost like she's writing Jazz.  Some entries are funny (meeting an elderly famous person when she's wearing a bathing suit),  some self-reflective (why is her dieting husband threatening?), and metaphoric (if the barn stands without the rocks for support, her marriage should withstand the slip of paper the wedding vows were written on.) along the way we encounter her children, current husband, first husband, friends and acquaintances who pop up on various days.

      The last entry was begun early in the writing, but finished at the end.  It, too, is a great "folded" riff and makes a great ending to this memoir.  Heidi - Ifeel like I know you!