Adding to these burdens are repressed memories of her domineering brother's death when they were young. The Depression, the drought-parched dust bowl landscape, her newborn son's strange lethargy and her knowledge that her husband, Ted, is an inveterate drinker and philanderer, cast grim shadows over Bena's attempts to come to terms with her future.
This surreal event, and others that follow, invest this compelling, though not flawless, debut novel with a dreamlike immediacy. She’s a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a founding editor of The Believer magazine.As they drive from Minnesota to her physician husband's new job in Pueblo, Colo., in 1934, Bena Jonssen encounters on-the-run bank thief Bonnie Parker (of Bonnie and Clyde fame), who gives her a tarnished silver charm. Her work has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Travel Essays. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in Harper’s, McSweeney’s, New York Magazine, The New York Times, and other places. Her first novel, The Mineral Palace, was a finalist for the Young Lions Literary Award. She is the author of four novels, among them The Vanishers (Doubleday, 2012), a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the PEN New England Fiction Award. With Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton, she edited the bestselling Women in Clothes (Blue Rider 2014). Heidi Julavits is the author, most recently, of the New York Times Notable book, The Folded Clock: A Diary (Doubleday, 2015). Julavits’s work keeps growing in scope and ambition, asking the biggest questions about love and fear and how best to make life meaningful, and answering with an inspiring level of courage, humor, and stylistic bravado.”ĭirections to Myself is available for preorder here.
It’s one of the most insightful representations I’ve read of what it feels like to be alive these days. In Directions to Myself, Julavits looks both backwards at her own childhood and forwards into her son’s future when she recognizes he is on the precipice of what she terms “the end times of childhood.” Through intimate, quotidian moments of domestic life, she confronts the grander questions of politics and gender, all the while interrogating her responsibility-and suitability-as her son’s mentor.Īuthor George Saunders praised the memoir, saying, “ Directions to Myself is an absolute stunner: frank, funny, self-aware, constantly surprising. Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years by Associate Professor Heidi Julavits ’96 will be published by Hogarth this summer.
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