Directions to Myself

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 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 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 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 *