Heidi Julavits is the author of two previous novels, The Mineral Palace and The Effect of Living Backwards, as well as a collaborative book, Hotel Andromeda, with the artist Jenny Gage. She is a founding editor of The Believer, and her writings have appeared in Esquire, Time, The New York Times, McSweeney's among other places. She lives in Manhattan and Maine.
“A novel of ideas that moves with the speed and inevitability of a
freight train. . . . Entertaining, devastating and as slippery as a
strand of its anti-heroine’s lank hair.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“The quest to excavate the intact truth from layers of mythology,
ideology, and memory is what yokes the reader to every word of
Heidi Julavits's new novel. . . . A riveting, at times deeply
funny, disturbing book.” —The Boston Globe
“Beautifully wrought. . . . Assertively smart, trickily
constructed.” —The New York Times
“An ingenious, seriocomic study of the female imagination’s power
to alter and contort the lives it touches.” —The Miami Herald
"A novel of ideas that moves with the speed and inevitability of a
freight train. . . . Entertaining, devastating and as slippery as a
strand of its anti-heroine's lank hair."
-Los Angeles Times Book Review
"The quest to excavate the intact truth from layers of mythology,
ideology, and memory is what yokes the reader to every word of
Heidi Julavits's new novel. . . . A riveting, at times deeply
funny, disturbing book." -The Boston Globe
"Beautifully wrought. . . . Assertively smart, trickily
constructed." -The New York Times
"An ingenious, seriocomic study of the female imagination's power
to alter and contort the lives it touches." -The Miami
Herald
On November 7, 1985, Mary Veal, 16, a not especially distinguished upper-middle-class girl, disappears from New England's Semmering Academy. A month later she reappears at Semmering, claiming amnesia, but hinting at abduction and ravishment. The events in Believer editor Julavits's third, beautifully executed novel take place on three levels: one, dedicated to "what might have happened," is the story of the supposedly blank interval; another is dedicated to the inevitable therapeutic aftermath, as Mary's therapist, Dr. Hammer, tries to discover whether Mary is lying, either about the abduction or the amnesia; and the present of the novel, which revolves around the funeral of Mary's mother, Paula, in 1999. There, Mary feels not only the hostility of her sisters, Regina (an unsuccessful poet) and Gaby (a disheveled lesbian) but Paula's posthumous hostility. Or is that an illusion? This structure delicately balances between gothic and comic, allowing Julavits to play variations on Mary's life and on the '80s moral panic of repressed memory syndromes and wild fears of child abuse. While Julavits (The Effect of Living Backwards) sometimes lets an overheated style distract from her central story, as its various layers coalesce, the mystery of what did happen to Mary Veal will enthrall the reader to the very last page. (Oct.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.
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