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Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years
A sharply observed memoir of motherhood and the self, and a love letter to Maine, by a writer Eula Biss calls "witty, sly, critical, inventive" and whose mind Leslie Jamison calls "electric."
"An absolute stunner: frank, funny, self-aware, constantly surprising."-George Saunders
That night, in his bed, I spread my son's palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination?
One summer 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." When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming-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, as well as education and prevention. She 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.
Looking back to her childhood in Maine, where she and her family often navigated the tricky coastline in a small boat, relying on a decades-old nautical guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy 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.
Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental, Directions to Myself cements Julavits's reputation as one of the most shrewdly innovative nonfiction writers at work today.
"An absolute stunner: frank, funny, self-aware, constantly surprising."-George Saunders
That night, in his bed, I spread my son's palm wide and tried to read it. If the hand was a map that led to a future person, was there any changing the destination?
One summer 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." When did this happen, she asks herself. Who is my son becoming-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, as well as education and prevention. She 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.
Looking back to her childhood in Maine, where she and her family often navigated the tricky coastline in a small boat, relying on a decades-old nautical guide, Julavits takes us on an intellectual navigation of the self. Throughout, she intertwines her internal analysis with a wide-ranging exploration of what it means to raise a child in a time full of contradictions and moral complexity. Using the past and present as points of orientation, Directions to Myself examines the messy 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.
Intimate, rigorous, and refreshingly unsentimental, Directions to Myself cements Julavits's reputation as one of the most shrewdly innovative nonfiction writers at work today.
Editorial Reviews
"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 . . . Heidi 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."-George Saunders, author of Lincoln in the Bardo
"Directions to Myself is the product of an awe-inspiring mind, whose "inner Maine," captured here, was a place I did not want to leave. The writing is a miracle of precision and spirit, and Heidi Julavits is as darkly funny as John Cheever, my other favorite Yankee subversive."-Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
"Inside these pages is a sanctuary of unwordable grief, exactly because of its 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, 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 Reviews
"Directions to Myself is the product of an awe-inspiring mind, whose "inner Maine," captured here, was a place I did not want to leave. The writing is a miracle of precision and spirit, and Heidi Julavits is as darkly funny as John Cheever, my other favorite Yankee subversive."-Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
"Inside these pages is a sanctuary of unwordable grief, exactly because of its 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, 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 Reviews
Short Excerpt Teaser
MAGNETIC DECLINATION
Here, the road hugs the ocean. The water comes and goes from view because the coast is shaped like a hand with hundreds of fingers, the road tracing the edge of the palm. When visible, the shore is a pile of seaweed-covered rocks, the water between 30 and 58 degrees and some shade of metal no matter the month. The ocean floor is covered with barnacles, mussel shells, and the spiky domes of dead anemones. Water shoes or old sneakers are recommended if planning to swim, along with a healthy sense of personal limits. Islands are farther away than they appear.
The sale is in the next town. My son, who is five, sits in the backseat. He's already announced: He's going on this errand against his will and won't be having any fun. I promise I'll be quick once we arrive, but I need to drive slower than the speed limit because of the frost heaves. They crack through the asphalt each winter. They wreck the shocks on cars already corroded by the salt the snowplows scatter, to keep everyone's tires from sliding. Even so, people in a hurry end up in the woods.
Nature is always warning: Slow down. Time is moving quickly, why must you move so quickly through it?
We find a parking spot near an electrical pole and walk past a person carrying a plastic tricycle and a rusted Weedwacker. Inside the barn, people politely jostle for position to inspect the offerings, displayed on tables and stacked in boxes. Objects on this peninsula travel in a slow orbit through the houses. Most of our possessions once belonged to people up and down the road. I know which house the rice cooker came from, and the raincoat with the broken zipper, and the amateur portraits of Napoleonic-era naval men. Things leave as well as enter. Our former front door is now the front door of a house we pass on the way to the grocery store.
I steer my moody son toward a basket of pendants and bracelets and rings because that's where his happiness is reliably located. I don't even think it counts as a trick to lead him here.
The used books table, where my happiness is located, is half covered in kitchen appliances so old that the task they were meant to ease is impossible to even guess. Art hangs on the wall, including a few framed charts of the area and a grid of knots in a shadow box. Each knot is identified by a bronze plaque. The Surgeon's Knot. The Strangle Knot. The Marlinespike Hitch. A friend hurries by with an armful of sheets-you should totally get that! she says, out of breath-but I already own a shadow box with a bronze plaque. I've recently started to envision the yard sale that will be thrown after my death. I need to curate my posthumous image now, so as not to be inaccurately seen as a person obsessed, for example, with shadow boxes.
Today, the majority of the books on the table are last century's self-help bestsellers and the usual selection of nautical and navigation books. These comprise the local canon. Most appear to never have been read, because people tend to want only to find themselves.
I sort through the piles. A few of the books I've bought at previous sales: Games People Play, Chapman Piloting and Seamanship, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, and A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast.
It doesn't count as doubling up-or, rather, won't compel future strangers, acquiring my belongings for one or two dollars, to get any wrong ideas about me-to buy an earlier edition of A Cruising Guide, because mine is from the 1970s, and this one is from the 1930s. At a glance, the spirit and methodology remain unchanged. Both give directions by telling little stories, often a mix of history, bigotry, gossip, hearsay, and lore. The warnings issued are stern and incessant; the outlook, given the Guide is written for people on vacation, refreshingly fatalistic.
Eternal vigilance, the Guide reminds, is the price of safety.
Instead of compass headings, the Guide describes how to enter dicey harbors using local landmarks such as "the high brick chimney of the sardine factory" as points of orientation. Some ledges are marked by actual shipwrecks.
The Guide also functions as a self-help book, its cautious wisdom transferable to people, lost or not, without plans to ever leave land.
It is no place for a stranger except in daylight and fair weather.
The approach is through a narrow channel where the tide runs ...
Here, the road hugs the ocean. The water comes and goes from view because the coast is shaped like a hand with hundreds of fingers, the road tracing the edge of the palm. When visible, the shore is a pile of seaweed-covered rocks, the water between 30 and 58 degrees and some shade of metal no matter the month. The ocean floor is covered with barnacles, mussel shells, and the spiky domes of dead anemones. Water shoes or old sneakers are recommended if planning to swim, along with a healthy sense of personal limits. Islands are farther away than they appear.
The sale is in the next town. My son, who is five, sits in the backseat. He's already announced: He's going on this errand against his will and won't be having any fun. I promise I'll be quick once we arrive, but I need to drive slower than the speed limit because of the frost heaves. They crack through the asphalt each winter. They wreck the shocks on cars already corroded by the salt the snowplows scatter, to keep everyone's tires from sliding. Even so, people in a hurry end up in the woods.
Nature is always warning: Slow down. Time is moving quickly, why must you move so quickly through it?
We find a parking spot near an electrical pole and walk past a person carrying a plastic tricycle and a rusted Weedwacker. Inside the barn, people politely jostle for position to inspect the offerings, displayed on tables and stacked in boxes. Objects on this peninsula travel in a slow orbit through the houses. Most of our possessions once belonged to people up and down the road. I know which house the rice cooker came from, and the raincoat with the broken zipper, and the amateur portraits of Napoleonic-era naval men. Things leave as well as enter. Our former front door is now the front door of a house we pass on the way to the grocery store.
I steer my moody son toward a basket of pendants and bracelets and rings because that's where his happiness is reliably located. I don't even think it counts as a trick to lead him here.
The used books table, where my happiness is located, is half covered in kitchen appliances so old that the task they were meant to ease is impossible to even guess. Art hangs on the wall, including a few framed charts of the area and a grid of knots in a shadow box. Each knot is identified by a bronze plaque. The Surgeon's Knot. The Strangle Knot. The Marlinespike Hitch. A friend hurries by with an armful of sheets-you should totally get that! she says, out of breath-but I already own a shadow box with a bronze plaque. I've recently started to envision the yard sale that will be thrown after my death. I need to curate my posthumous image now, so as not to be inaccurately seen as a person obsessed, for example, with shadow boxes.
Today, the majority of the books on the table are last century's self-help bestsellers and the usual selection of nautical and navigation books. These comprise the local canon. Most appear to never have been read, because people tend to want only to find themselves.
I sort through the piles. A few of the books I've bought at previous sales: Games People Play, Chapman Piloting and Seamanship, Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them, and A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast.
It doesn't count as doubling up-or, rather, won't compel future strangers, acquiring my belongings for one or two dollars, to get any wrong ideas about me-to buy an earlier edition of A Cruising Guide, because mine is from the 1970s, and this one is from the 1930s. At a glance, the spirit and methodology remain unchanged. Both give directions by telling little stories, often a mix of history, bigotry, gossip, hearsay, and lore. The warnings issued are stern and incessant; the outlook, given the Guide is written for people on vacation, refreshingly fatalistic.
Eternal vigilance, the Guide reminds, is the price of safety.
Instead of compass headings, the Guide describes how to enter dicey harbors using local landmarks such as "the high brick chimney of the sardine factory" as points of orientation. Some ledges are marked by actual shipwrecks.
The Guide also functions as a self-help book, its cautious wisdom transferable to people, lost or not, without plans to ever leave land.
It is no place for a stranger except in daylight and fair weather.
The approach is through a narrow channel where the tide runs ...
