When Heidi Julavits rediscovered her childhood diaries, she hoped to find in them 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. More alarmingly, Julavits realized that what she wanted then and now has scarcely changed. Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer.

In The Folded Clock, the diary form becomes a meditation on time and self, youth and aging, betrayal and loyalty, friendship and romance, faith and fate, marriage and family, desire and death, gossip and secrets, art and ambition. Concealed beneath the minute obsession with the day-to-day are sharply observed moments of cultural criticism, emotionally driven philosophical queries, and shocking candor, as the focus shifts from the woman Julavits wants to be to the woman she may have become.

A tour de force by one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters, The Folded Clock explodes the typically confessional diary form with humor, honesty, and searing intelligence.