Heidi Julavits
Heidi Julavits
Heidi Suzanne Julavits is an American author and co-editor of The Believer magazine. She has been published in The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 2, Esquire, Culture+Travel, Story, Zoetrope All-Story, and McSweeney’s Quarterly. Her novels include The Mineral Palace, The Effect of Living Backwards, The Uses of Enchantment, and The Vanishers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
thinking challenges desire
I don't think women are, by definition, toxic to one another. I think women are simultaneously competitive toward and idolatrous of each other. I thrive on that challenge and that desire.
smart inspire style
I surround myself with women who inspire me to be more ambitious, and who constantly astonish me with their magnetism, style, and smarts.
pain thinking needs
I really did for a few weeks think, I'm in pain because the world needs me to save it. Which is so ridiculous and egotistical.
spiritual teacher pain
A friend of mine urged me to see my pain as an opportunity. And since the same psychic that contacted Dion Fortune had told me that I was a "teacher" - she didn't mean at Columbia, she meant in the spiritual sense - I decided my affliction was the universe telling me that it was time to stop writing fiction and become the spiritual guru I was clearly meant to be.
suffering purpose noble
The belief that one's suffering has a greater cosmic purpose, and is thus more exciting and more noble, well, it made a lot of sense to me.
memories interesting identity
I guess what I find so interesting about memory, and its role in a person's identity, is how the attempt to achieve accuracy requires you to remove yourself from your life in an authorial manner.
remember-something moments blur
I go through life now reminding myself to remember something, and I do this while that something is happening. I'll be experiencing a moment and I'll say to myself, "Remember this!" Otherwise my whole life just blurs by.
memories sound making-memories
I've subsequently become conscious of MAKING MEMORIES. Which makes me sound like a scrapbooker.
memories loss perspective
I used to have a really sharp memory. And its loss has proven destabilizing from an identity perspective.
stupidity live-in-the-moment dull
I am simply looking for a companion with whom to spend my days, a companion who will cherish as much as I the stupidity of living in the moment, and spend every dull, amazing second with me.
girl mother running
Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades.
artist people what-if
Our cover has always been really important. For those of you who haven’t seen itCharles Burns, who is a graphic artist, does four portraits, so it’s split into quadrants and there’s four heads, basically—portraits of people. We’ve actually often thought and freaked out, what if something happened to Charles Burns? Because he’s so identified with the cover of our magazine, I don’t know what we would do if anything happened to Charles Burns.
psychics demise energy
When you are expending much energy on someone else's demise, it's like you weaken your psychic immune system.
sleep night people
I tell myself it's a virtue, my failure to sleep in my own house, or at all. I tell myself that I spend more hours than most people aware that I am alive, and that over a lifetime this adds up to more living, more aliveness. I am more alive than the rest of my family. Which is my greatest night fear. Which is why I hunt. I don't ever want to be more alive than they are.