The Folded Clock

1) "This fancy town is also a famed warfare site, and not only of the domestic variety. I've been told the history of this town. A Revolutionary War—era something happened there. The battle of something. During the war, people floated their houses here on boats from (or maybe to) Quebec. Or from (or maybe to) Massachusetts. They were either too sentimental to leave their houses where they'd built them, or they were too cheap to build new ones. When I think of this town, the image that comes to mind is a harbor clogged by floating houses, and people in tri-corner hats yelling at each other, 'Watch your front porch, asshole!'"

2) "It was fortunate, I guess, that the one normal-sized finger I possess is the finger on which wedding rings are meant to go. When I was first married, I was much more interested in wedding-type wedding rings, and those rings tend to be small, especially if you're broke, because you have to buy them used, and so they tend to date back to an age when people and fingers were tinier. My first husband and I bought my wedding ring at a pawnshop. People marveled at our brazenness. 'Isn't it bad luck to buy a secondhand wedding ring?' These people assumed the ring had been sold to the pawnshop following a divorce. My first husband preferred to think the woman who'd once owned the ring had died in a sky-diving accident. Years after our divorce, I still own the ring. I keep it in a small box with old business cards and postage stamps of outdated denominations. The box moves around my Maine home, sometimes in this room, sometimes in that. As with many things I don't keep track of or care much about, I never lose it."

3) "Maybe I was at an impasse with all gurus. Maybe I was looking to the wrong people for answers and clarity. I turned instead to a guidebook for guidance. A real guidebook. Someone had left it in the common bookshelf of our hotel's dining room. It was called Getting Along in Italian. According to Getting Along in Italian, one can ably survive a vacation and probably a whole life knowing how to ask and answer a few pages' worth of questions. I narrowed the options down to these essentials:
Are you alone?
Where is my key?
This is a violation.
I have pain in my chest.
There is a mistake in the bill.
Where are the lifeboats?
Did anyone call me?
Did anyone come for me?
I want a felt hat.
I want a novel.
I want a priest."

4) "I skied across the Brooklyn Bridge because I was losing the thread. I felt disconnected from the person who once trekked alone through blizzards, the person who was from Maine and didn't give a shit about parties and fame. The stone used to make the bridge's arches was quarried in Maine, and taken from a hole in the ground that had since filled up with water and in which I'd once gone swimming. Both of these stories are about my first few years of what would become two decades in a city that didn't immediately feel like home and still sometimes doesn't. It so didn't feel like home that I married a man I knew I should not because his mother lived in a house that, because of its windows and its molding and its old plaster smell, reminded me of Maine; New York so didn't feel like home that I would often walk across the bridge to lean my forehead against the stone arches and touch the ground from which I'd come. If they could persist here, these stones, and retain their shape, then so could I."

5) "Maybe this was also true of the Italian ghost. She meant me no harm. Possibly she didn't even exist. I'd mistaken my exhaustion for a long-dead woman who'd lost her children. To be melancholy is to be self-haunted, and among the many reasons this is an unsatisfactory explanation for living inside a jam jar inside an aquarium, foremost among them is that there are no good stories to tell of your bleak time in a beautiful place, and no specter to blame for the fact that happiness, though it should have been inescapable, evaded you."

6) "Speaking of lost. I seem to have lost 'today.' Now it is six months earlier than it was when I started this entry. I am in Maine, and it is a year since I began this book, and I am trying to finish it. I have just spent the weekend with my parents. I am convinced that it is impossible to temporarily visit people with whom you used to permanently live. We cannot tap back into the old ease of cohabitation. We try and we try, and I don't want to call these attempts futile, because for every million misses there exists a single success. I had a success five days ago. I rowed to an island with my father and my son. My son ignored us—he set mussel shells afloat and then sunk them with a raining hell-fire of pebbles. My father and I, meanwhile, admired the rocks balanced atop other rocks. In Maine, on islands, rock manipulation is a form of tagging. We were here. The rock manipulation feats of our predecessors were daunting, almost spooky. They were supernatural acts of object levitation. A tall, thin rock balanced on its narrowest point, like a saltshaker on a pile of salt. I thought we could never practice this variety of beach sorcery, but we tried and we did. We were either extremely skilled or what we were attempting was not, despite appearances, very hard. Regardless, the activity consumed us. My father and I, we walked along the shoreline and searched for rocks. We tried to find the right combination of hollow here and jag there. Though we'd never before performed such precarious and optically illusory balancing acts, the activity felt familiar to us both. I had spent many summer days as a kid trying to lose myself to fun on islands. My father had spent many summer days—and winter days, and fall and spring days—trying to lose himself to fun with me. We were at the mall. We were spinning tops. We were drilling downward. The disappearance of the invisible but present object-time—is how we fall back into love with people we never, according to language at least, stopped loving."

This is a diary of sorts. It's a fabricated diary. Or it's a real diary that is stitched together into something that is more than a diary.

It doesn't matter because that something more—the work that emerges from stitching the fabric of everyday life together—is extraordinary.

I think I read that Heidi Julavits called her self an "explorer of interiors". And this is very much an exploration of her interior life. It could be (and probably has been) accused of navel gazing. But to dismiss it as naval gazing is to miss... not so much the point as the experience.

There are meditations here on time, family, friendship, gossip, thrift stores. And these can be fascinating and entertaining. What will stay with me, though, are the moments of uncertainty and second guessing. These are honestly portrayed. There were times when they were so honest, I felt embarrassed. Of course, the times I felt most embarrassed were the times I recognised myself in these moments or tortuous indecision.