I might have made a note of this episode regardless of what I was reading, but the fact that it was Julavits pinned it fast to my mind. “Directions to Myself” is full of scenes like this one, moments in which boys roughhouse and shit-talk, honing themselves against one another. Julavits watches them closely. She’s interested in the formation of masculinity, how boys learn to do and to be, and in the development of one boy in particular: her son, who is five when the book begins and ten when it ends. Those private years happen to coincide with ones of public consequence—the period leading up to and immediately following Harvey Weinstein’s downfall, when the alleged grotesqueries of men, and a few notable boys, were thrust into the news. We get glimpses of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who was sentenced to six months in jail, in the spring of 2016, after being convicted of assaulting an unconscious woman outside a campus party, and of Paul Nungesser, the Columbia student accused of rape by his classmate Emma Sulkowicz, who, after Nungesser was cleared of wrongdoing by a university panel, carried a mattress around campus during the 2014-15 school year to demand his expulsion. Julavits doesn’t mention Weinstein, or, for that matter, Donald Trump, and she doesn’t need to. They are simply part of the air we all breathe.
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Her son knows nothing of these guys. In the chapter in which Turner appears, he’s only six. But that six-year-old will one day be sixteen, then twenty, far from the sphere of a mother’s influence. Julavits has seen what growing up looks like—she has an older child, a daughter—and she mourns the loss of her son even now. He’s barely old enough to tie his shoelaces, but already she fears that he is entering what she calls, a touch dramatically, “the end times of his childhood,” that period when he’ll start to test the bounds of his independence. “Eventually, whatever force has grounded this oscillation—from my perspective, me—fails to exert any power at all,” she writes. All parents worry about what the world might do to their children. Julavits worries about what her child might do to the world. Some boys become loving, gentle, generous men. Others cause grievous harm. What power does Julavits—does any mother—have to set her son’s course?
Going by the numbers, not much. The world is full of countless bad influences, but there is only one Julavits to combat them. Early in the book, her son—he is still six—comes home from a friend’s house boasting of a new word that he has added to his vocabulary. “He was so excited to share with me what had happened,” Julavits writes. “His friend’s older brother was making fun of a boy in his grade who loved musicals and was only friends with girls. The brother said of this boy, according to my son, He hangs out with sluts! ”
Julavits discusses the situation with her husband. She favors direct intervention. “Clearly, I said, if the two of us don’t pay close attention, our small boy might call girls sluts so his friends would like him better, and then, over time, he might come to think that girls were sluts, maybe especially the ones who refused to have sex with him.” Today’s word is tomorrow’s belief, and isn’t belief the seed of action? Her husband prefers a wait-and-see approach: “He trusted that, through example and education—and by staying vigilant—the two of us could limit certain negative outcomes and help him sort through the many competing messages the world can send a small boy on his way to adulthood.” Julavits finds this adamantly reasonable, and totally insufficient. The next day, she sits her son down for a talk. Does he know what the word “slut” actually means? Its definition, she informs him, is “a woman who has many casual sex partners”:
Forget about defining “slut” for a six-year-old; what about “economy,” “vigor,” “conventionally,” and “presides”? 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. (Sometimes they do in books. Rachel Cusk’s “Outline” trilogy casts a long stylistic shadow here.) Maybe Julavits, who was born in 1968, is sending up her generation’s overdetermined pedagogy, the belief that a child can’t merely be told that a behavior is wrong but must be made to understand why. The threat of an explanation may be deterrent enough: this one goes on for two more excruciating paragraphs, and by the end her son seems thoroughly baffled.
But Julavits doesn’t play the scene for laughs. The mood, here and throughout “Directions to Myself,” is anxious, ominous, tense—“vigilant,” to borrow Julavits’s word, as if disaster were forever lurking a beat away. This will surprise readers who thrilled to “The Folded Clock,” Julavits’s previous memoir, which was published in 2015. The Julavits of that book was a sly, charming narrator of her own life, a witty formal manipulator who took the idea of a diary and bent it all out of shape, creating an ingeniously plastic calendar in which a day in October might follow one in July and the past could come blowing suddenly through the present before time settled, again, into its proper order. Her intelligent, disciplined playfulness seemed evidence of a happy mind.
It’s not hard to guess at some of what has come to trouble it since: Trump, #MeToo, the decade’s non-stop parade of bad news about bad men. In “Directions to Myself,” Julavits is frequently funny on the level of the sentence—I’m still laughing at her description of an Annunciation painting in which “a woman is hiding behind a table because a little boy wearing a dress broke into her house”—but she has lost her broader comic point of view. Comedy depends on a confidence in endings, a trust that all will be well. That faith is tough to keep when the world insists on brandishing evidence to the contrary.
Take Brock Turner. Julavits doesn’t call him, or anyone else in her book, by name; she prefers the obscuring gloom of allusion. (Even Columbia University, where Julavits and her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, teach, is referred to, with euphemistic menace, as “our boss.”) But Turner is plainly the “young man who’d been convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman” whom Julavits discusses, at a café, with one of her former students, who is now in law school. He and some classmates have been analyzing the letters that Turner’s parents sent to the judge before sentencing. The father, Julavits’s student says, “makes excuses and blames everyone and everything except his son.” The mother he finds even more egregious. She begins her letter by listing her son’s admirable qualities—“easy-going, kind, considerate”—but soon loses all control. “WHY? WHY?” she writes to the judge. The student says she might be addressing “herself or the universe or, because she mentions church at one point, God.” Julavits has a different thought, though she doesn’t tell it to him: “Maybe she was addressing her son. Why had he done it? Why had he become this man?”
On that note of fraught ambiguity, the chapter ends. Does Julavits share a contempt for Turner’s mother, whose refusal to acknowledge her son’s crime may be its own moral stain? Or does she have some sympathy for this woman, who, finding herself in the nightmarish position of discovering that her son has done something awful, must nonetheless go on loving him? There is a sense that Julavits is forcing herself to confront the question now as a kind of insurance against being made to face it in the future. Of course, she doesn’t expect her son to one day commit assault—but neither did the mother of Brock Turner. Neither, we can assume, did the mother of the boy who, Julavits writes, a month into her freshman year at a college “known for its terrible treatment of women” (she went to Dartmouth), crept into her dorm at night and assaulted a visiting high-school student who was staying on her couch. This is the kind of story that people like to call “shocking but not surprising.” “That’s somebody’s daughter,” such people might say, as if a girl’s personhood is conferred through her family. Yes, and it was also somebody’s son.
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. On the one hand, to not do everything in her power to prevent her son from harming women would be to abnegate her duty to the future. On the other, obsessing over possible bad outcomes has a way of poisoning the present. In “The Folded Clock,” Julavits’s home life—she and her family spend the school year in New York and the summers in Maine, where she grew up—was a particular source of pleasure, and of spiritual safety. Now the home seems appallingly permeable to external forces. When her son is eight, Julavits and her husband allow him to have a video-game console, which they keep in the living room for the purpose of parental surveillance. “After plugging in the machine, my husband gives our son a primer about gamer culture, and how boys and men, as an acceptable, and even socially pressured, part of their patter, boisterously disrespect and verbally abuse people,” Julavits writes. “He makes it clear that the virtual world he’s about to enter does not reflect the values of our household, and he should be aware of maintaining that gap. Should he be overheard making misogynistic or homophobic or transphobic or racist or in any other way offensive comments, even if he doesn’t know what they mean, he will be banned from playing for a week.” The inadequacy of this system is evident from the very nature of the rules established to enforce it. They might as well take their son to an amusement park and tell him to stay off the rides.
Julavits’s preoccupation with things that have not yet and, it must be hoped, will never come to pass presents a literary problem, too. The future holds any number of possibilities for the man her son will become. In the present, though, he is still a boy, and a young one at that. Even as Julavits makes him her subject, she is reluctant—wisely—to show us too much of him; as a result, the child we get can seem more a collection of characteristics than a character in his own right. The most distinctive of these is his long hair, which Julavits seems to think will somehow develop his capacity to empathize with the female condition by giving him “a brief chance to experience what some never do”—that is, to be treated by strangers as a girl, though this seems merely to embarrass strangers and to distress him.
Maybe to make up for the particulars that she can’t disclose, Julavits leans heavily on metaphor. The big motif of the book is navigation; Julavits finds much figurative wisdom in an old volume she buys at a Maine yard sale called “A Cruising Guide to the New England Coast.” 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. (“Points of orientation aren’t constant,” she tells her son. “They change over time.” ) There’s also a parental tendency to issue pronouncements. “True stories don’t have ‘endings,’ ” Julavits tells her kids. “They have morals.” But morals are the province of fables. Life rarely comes to a single point.
Julavits the mother may not want to believe this. Julavits the writer must know it to be true. “Directions to Myself” is at its best when Julavits, as her title suggests, considers how she might grow alongside her child. What she fears most—the passage of time—is also that fear’s remedy. She dreads the moment when she won’t be able to act as her son’s protector, but she sees a sort of freedom in it, too. Toward the end of the book, as Julavits and her son are rowing along the Maine coast, they pass a rock that she has selected as the site of her eventual funeral. She has already given her kids “very specific directions” for the event. It will take place in early August, at around 6 p.m., when the tide is high “and the wind blowing not at all or from the south, so that the rock will be in the lee”:
This is sweet, serene, loving, and delightfully macabre. Julavits is regaining her comic equilibrium. When she reminds her son of her plans, he rolls his eyes, which pleases her. “I can’t insist that my children tell laughingly critical stories about me at my funeral, so I must, while alive, behave in a laughable manner to have any shot of getting what I want when I’m dead,” she writes. There’s wisdom in this strategy. We look to the past to guide the future, but the present is where we live. We prepare for the worst and hope for the best. It may all turn out fine in the end. ♦
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