The essay instead reflects on the intimacy of keeping abreast of one’s self. Manguso’s Ongoingness achieves a grace no diary possibly could, because it is not a diary at all. The clock is folded a kind of formal mirroring of what it feels like to remember. The reader experiences the trip she takes with her husband to Germany one September in near-simultaneity with her musings on attending a rummage sale in July. The title refers to the way the finished diary is structured the book doesn’t read chronologically, with entries from June butting up against entries from October, or January. Julavits begins by describing her childhood diary, where she began each entry with, “Today I …”, a habit she adopts for this project (as I have for this column). In the spirit of Thoreau’s Walden, Julavits writes observations on the matter of her days, a trip with her husband to Germany, the best place for her to sit on her breaks from work, the greetings strangers toss off at her, an old tap handle she discovered in the wall of her house during a renovation. Article contentĮarlier this month, Heidi Julavits, a co-founder of The Believer magazine (and coincidentally a Guggenheim fellow herself), has come out with a diary of her own: The Folded Clock (Doubleday, 304 pp $32), which chronicles two years of the novelist’s life in short personal essays. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. In my own diary, I can see I had a lot of thoughts about the articles that accompanied the release of Sontag’s second volume, but I had no great interest in reading it for myself: “The perhaps pathetic truth is that I am only interested in reading my own diary, though sometimes I am bored even then.” Nonetheless, diaries, it seems, are everywhere: In recent years we’ve seen the scandalous 1902 journal I Await The Devil’s Coming by a teenage (secretly Canadian) Mary MacLane come back into view after being reissued by Melville House Books, and two of three promised volumes of Susan Sontag’s agonizingly personal journals were made available in 2012. Manguso, a poet, Guggenheim fellow, novelist and memoirist, is prolific enough without listing the quotidian personal itinerary of any given day. In it, she describes the daily diary she’d kept for a quarter century and her evolving relationship with her compulsion to describe the events of her life, if only to herself: “I couldn’t face the end of a day without a record of everything that had ever happened.” Of course, even the 800,000 words she’s written into her diary is not enough.
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