Description

‘An absolute stunner: frank, funny, self-aware, constantly surprising … One of the most insightful representations I’ve read of what it feels like to be alive these days’ GEORGE SAUNDERS

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A memoir of finding where you are – so you know where you’re going

One day Heidi Julavits sees her son silhouetted by the sun and notices he is at the threshold of what she calls ‘the end times of childhood.’ Who is my son becoming, she asks herself – and what qualifies me to be his guide?

The next four years feel like uncharted waters. Rape allegations rock the university campus where Julavits teaches, unleashing questions of justice and accountability, education and prevention. Julavits begins to wonder how to prepare her son to be the best possible citizen of the world he’s about to enter. And what she must learn about herself to responsibly steer him.

Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the minutiae of family life alongside knottier questions of politics and gender. Through it all, Julavits discovers the beauty and the peril of telling stories as a way to locate ourselves and help others find us.

‘The product of an awe-inspiring mind … The writing is a miracle of precision and spirit, and Heidi Julavits is as darkly funny as John Cheever’ Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room

‘Honest, blazing, and generous, Directions to Myself manages to be an essay about everything by focusing intently on the basic human need of giving care to other people’ Catherine Lacey, author of Biography of X

Publisher Review

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, humour, and stylistic bravado — GEORGE SAUNDERS Sweet, serene, loving, and delightfully macabre * NEW YORKER * An achingly rendered experience of parenthood * WASHINGTON POST * The product of an awe-inspiring mind … The writing is a miracle of precision and spirit, and Heidi Julavits is as darkly funny as John Cheever — RACHEL KUSHNER, author of The Mars Room Julavits writes with sparkling insight and stunning clarity * BUSTLE, The Most Anticipated Books Of Spring & Summer 2023 * It’s a beautiful book, funny, sad, full of acute feeling and astute observations. It seemed to me to be, more than anything, about the colossal significance of seemingly small moments, and the tremendous ripple effects of humdrum decisions — SARA BAUME, author of Seven Steeples In this self-aware book, issues of politics and gender thread together with the daily ins and outs of family life * TIME, 25 New Books You Need to Read This Summer * Inside these pages is a sanctuary of unwordable grief, exactly because of their proximity to our purpose and joy, our mothering, our try, our children. We have tried our best. Now, to the world they go. Please meet them where we mothers are. This book is the purest expression of this hope I have read – the immense particular incarnate. It’s also wicked funny, as the greatest heartbreaks must be for their ebb — DEDE GARDNER, two-time Oscar winning producer of 12 Years a Slave and Moonlight Honest, blazing, and generous, Directions to Myself manages to be an essay about everything by focusing intently on the basic human need of giving care to other people. Something as simple as the fact that we teach our friends, children, and partners how to be in the world through the way that we care for them feels totally new in Julavits’s elegant and energetic voice. Truly astounding — CATHERINE LACEY, author of Biography of X A touching meditation on time, motherhood, and memory … Affecting reflections on life’s transitions * KIRKUS * Praise for Heidi Julavits: Witty, sly, critical, inventive and adventurous … Her prose, like E. B. White’s, is especially liquid, and her sentences are unimpeachable * New York Times * Scathingly funny … An engaging portrait of a woman’s sense of identity, which continually shape-shifts with time * Los Angeles Times * An absolute tour de force — George Saunders Mesmerising — Amy Tan With astounding intelligence and unceasing acuity, Heidi Julavits fulfills the great promise of her talents, and jumps to the forefront of her generation. This could be the smartest and most challenging book I’ve read by anyone our age, and beyond that, it’s just plain hard to put down — Dave Eggers A fascinating quasi-memoir … The humor and the pathos of the book arise from [the] mismatch between the urgency of a decision in the moment and the awareness that always runs beneath it: that time will eventually make most things not matter * Washington Post * Playful, intimate and deeply insightful … Julavits is someone you truly want to know * Chicago Tribune * Like E. B. White or David Foster Wallace before her, Julavits might be ashamed of her little vanities and obsessions … but that doesn’t prevent her from laying them bare without sugar-coating a thing … There’s not a single uninteresting anecdote or scrap of flabby prose throughout * Barnes and Noble * An incisive and penetrating thinker, as exacting as she is forgiving in her observations about the self and the world * Electric Literature *