Purposefully. aimless ... A book about loss, the daily minuscule cuts that come from raising a child ... An achingly rendered experience of parenthood.
Though thematically knotty, Julavits’s writing is a life raft: elegant without sentimentality ... Her prose is buoyed by a sharp sense of humor ... Directions to Myself is less a memoir of parenting and more a memoir of developing personhood.
Julavits describes this feeling perfectly ... A series of vignettes, an open airing of the worries and fears of a woman in the 21st century, an ode to books and streams and rocks and artifacts and to family.
Julavits’s book is full of this kind of reported speech—hard, hammered sentences stripped of voice and styled like logic proofs—but to what end? Nobody talks this way in life ... Julavits doesn’t play the scene for laughs. The mood, here and throughout Directions to Myself, is anxious, ominous, tense ... Julavits is frequently funny on the level of the sentence...but she has lost her broader comic point of view. Comedy depends on a confidence in endings, a trust that all will be well ... As a moral matter, Julavits’s vigilance is admirable; she is trying not to prioritize personal love over collective responsibility. As a human one, it puts her in a double bind ... Julavits leans heavily on metaphor ... A steady refrain of harbors, storms, rowing, and guiding stars at first summons a parable-like rhetorical power but comes to erode her book’s finer observations.
Directions to Myself offers latter-day truths, set against a backdrop of navigational touchstones. Like the nautical wisdom that infuses the book, the effect is, by turns, provocative and disarming ... Both elegy and playbook – witty and ingenious, wistful and smart.
Julavits’ fans will enjoy the insights into her life, child-rearing, and finding direction for one’s self and one’s family, but readers new to her work may be left out in the cold by this combination of New England reminiscence and rumination on unorthodox parenting choices
