In The New York Times Book Review, Eula Biss reviews Heidi Julavits’s “The Folded Clock.” Ms. Biss writes:
Heidi Julavits once said that keeping a diary when she was young is what made her a writer. Julavits, the author of four novels, revisits that story in the opening pages of her latest work, “The Folded Clock.” She tells of returning to her childhood diaries after making that claim, looking for evidence of the writer she would become. “The actual diaries, however, fail to corroborate the myth I’d concocted for myself,” she admits. “They reveal me to possess the mind, not of a future writer, but of a future paranoid tax auditor. I exhibited no imagination, no trace of a style, no wit, no personality.” With “The Folded Clock,” she corrects the record. Keeping a diary may not have made her a writer, but becoming a writer has made it possible for her to produce, now, an exquisite diary.
This week, Ms. Julavits discusses “The Folded Clock”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Jeffrey Lieberman talks about “Shrinks”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.