Reader’s Report
Bumped into this in my inbox last night– a thing I wrote this summer
for @myszko‘s Reader’s Report about sleeping with Heidi Julavits(’s The Folded Clock):
Lately I’ve been sleeping with Heidi Julavits. I was lucky to snag an advanced copy of The Folded Clock—though it’s out everywhere now; go get it!—but midst grading stacks of semester’s-end research papers, reading slush for Blunderbussand a pair of novels by writers with whom I’m meant to converse on a panel next month, I could only squeeze Julavits in at night, in those final moments before sleep.
To say that I fall asleep reading The Folded Clock is to do the book a disservice. I want to keep reading, and find myself fighting sleep to finish one more entry, then one more, until finally I pass out.
The subtitle of The Folded Clock is “A Diary,” but, unlike we sometimes see with journals or memoirs, Julavits is refreshingly open about the fact that the book has been altered, not only to protect the privacy and identity of others, but also as somewhat of a composite year really made out of two years’ worth of entries. The fact that the diary is out of chronological order (the first five entries are dated June 21, March 3, July 29, July 18 and August 2) reinforces the notion that a diary, or any narrative for that matter, can be edited and shaped but still “true.”
As a reader I was willing to follow and believe Julavits’s stories despite the reorganization because she doesn’t alter or conceal anything in hopes of making herself “look good.” She writes about watching The Bachelorette; she writes about a time when, on a plane and wedged into the window seat next to a fat sleeping man she was too embarrassed to wake up, she tried to pee in an airsickness bag. Her honesty is endearing, but it is also important—a reflection of what it means to be a writer, a woman, a wife and a mother.
Knausgaardian in its expounding of everyday moments, what makes Julavits’s book often a more pleasant and more engaging read is that she does some of the filtering and some of the analytical work for us. And because she writes in such an intimate, occasionally confessional tone, it feels right to fall asleep beside The Folded Clock, like having a slumber party with a best friend who you both know is smarter than you, but speaks to you like an equal anyway, whispering secrets through the dark
from the tinyletter http://tinyletter.com/myszka_mz/letters/rr-13-dreams-brain-schemes-with-a-report-by-sara
