Folded Clock

A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of one year in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits
 
     Like many young girls, Heidi Julavits wrote in her diary every day. Years later, she found her old diaries, hoping to find proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, "The actual diaries revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor." The entries are daily chronicles of anxieties about grades, looks, boys, and popularity. Reading these lines from 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, youth and aging, sex and marriage, childhood and parenting, art and ambition, regret and pleasure. In keeping with the spirit of a diary, the tone is confessional, sometimes shockingly so, as the focus shifts from whom she wants to be to whom she may have become. Unlike her childhood diary the order is not chronological, but instead guided by the dictates of events that trigger memory and reflection—a small-town parade, trying to flirt her way out of a traffic ticket, asking her husband if her new sunglasses are flattering. 
     What elevates the book above an exercise in self-absorption is Julavits's raucous sense of humor about her foibles and misadventures. The Folded Clock is as playful as it is brilliant, a tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters.

Un jurnal rau, uimitor de candid, delirant de inteligent, de un an in viata incomparabilului Heidi Julavits La fel ca multe fete tinere, Heidi Julavits scria in jurnalul ei in fiecare zi. Ani mai tarziu, si-a gasit vechile jurnale, sperand sa gaseasca dovezi ca era intotdeauna destinata sa fie scriitoare.