Get our Best Book Club Books of 2025 eBook!

Summary and Reviews of The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits

The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavits

The Folded Clock

A Diary

by Heidi Julavits
  • BookBrowse Review:
  • Critics' Consensus (8):
  • First Published:
  • Apr 7, 2015, 304 pages
  • Paperback:
  • Mar 2016, 304 pages
  • Rate this book

About This Book

Book Summary

A raucous, stunningly candid, deliriously smart diary of two years in the life of the incomparable Heidi Julavits

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, 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 "dailiness" are sharply observed moments of cultural criticism and emotionally driven philosophical queries.  In keeping with the spirit of a diary, the tone is confessional, sometimes shockingly so, as the focus shifts from the woman she wants to be to the woman she may have become.

Julavits's spirited sense of humor about her foibles and misadventures, combined with her ceaseless intelligence and curiosity, explode the typically confessional diary form.  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.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Reviews

BookBrowse Review

BookBrowse

Every entry in The Folded Clock starts with the word "Today," but this is not a diary of events and happenings: this is far more a journal of the mind. Each "Today" moment serves as a setting off point for Julavits' sharp wit, her observation and her unblinking consideration of themes. Heidi Julavits is first and foremost a writer: someone who talks about her craft and has composed and deliberately structured this diary in a non-linear form, yet there is an overarching sense of candor and honesty in The Folded Clock that makes it a memorable and admirable piece of work. Highly recommended...continued

Full Review (694 words)

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access, become a member today.

(Reviewed by Kate Braithwaite).

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Beyond the Book



The Diaries of Marie Vassiltchikov and the Goncourt Brothers

In The Folded Clock, which is a curated selection of Julavits' journal entries over two years, she writes about reading diaries by Franz Kafka and Virginia Woolf. These are two giants of twentieth-century literature and thought, but Julavits also references other less well-known practitioners of the craft, including Marie Vassiltchikov (Berlin Diaries) and the Goncourt brothers.

Marie Vassiltchikov Marie Vassiltchikov was a Russian princess who emigrated with her parents to Germany as a young child. During World War II, Vassiltchikov, who was proficient in English, managed to find employment in the Information Department of the German Foreign Ministry. Her Berlin Diaries, 1940-1945, chronicle Vassiltchikov's daily life and experiences during the war. ...

This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.

Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

Read-Alikes

Read-Alikes Full readalike results are for members only

If you liked The Folded Clock, try these:

  • I Am, I Am, I Am jacket

    I Am, I Am, I Am

    by Maggie O'Farrell

    Published 2019

    About this book

    More by this author

    An extraordinary memoir - told entirely in near-death experiences - from one of Britain's best-selling novelists, for fans of Wild, When Breath Becomes Air, and The Year of Magical Thinking.

  • H Is for Hawk jacket

    H Is for Hawk

    by Helen Macdonald

    Published 2016

    About this book

    More by this author

    Winner of the 2015 BookBrowse Nonfiction Award

    Obsession, madness, memory, myth, and history combine to achieve a distinctive blend of nature writing and memoir from an outstanding literary innovator.

We have 7 read-alikes for The Folded Clock, but non-members are limited to two results. To see the complete list of this book's read-alikes, you need to be a member.
More books by Heidi Julavits
Search read-alikes
How we choose read-alikes
Membership Advantages
  • Reviews
  • "Beyond the Book" articles
  • Free books to read and review (US only)
  • Find books by time period, setting & theme
  • Read-alike suggestions by book and author
  • Book club discussions
  • and much more!
  • Just $60 for 12 months or $20 for 3 months.
  • More about membership!

BookBrowse Book Club

Book Jacket
Real Americans
by Rachel Khong
From the author of Goodbye, Vitamin, a novel exploring family, identity, and the shaping of destiny.
Book Jacket
The Devil Finds Work
by James Baldwin
A book-length essay on racism in American films, by "the best essayist in this country" (The New York Times Book Review).
Book Jacket
The River Knows Your Name
by Kelly Mustian
A haunting Southern novel about memory and love, from the author of The Girls in the Stilt House.

Members Recommend

  • Book Jacket

    Happy Land
    by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

    From the New York Times bestselling author, a novel about a family's secret ties to a vanished American Kingdom.

  • Book Jacket

    The Fairbanks Four
    by Brian Patrick O’Donoghue

    One murder, four guilty convictions, and a community determined to find justice.

  • Book Jacket

    One Death at a Time
    by Abbi Waxman

    A cranky ex-actress and her Gen Z sobriety sponsor team up to solve a murder that could send her back to prison in this dazzling mystery.

  • Book Jacket

    The Seven O'Clock Club
    by Amelia Ireland

    Four strangers join an experimental treatment to heal broken hearts in Amelia Ireland's heartfelt debut novel.

Who Said...

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say

Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!

Wordplay

Solve this clue:

A C on H S

and be entered to win..