Born to parents who moved to Portland in 1965, Julavits has described her family as "Year-Round Resident, Seasonally Irritated" rather than "Mainers Who Can Trace Their Mainerness Back Through Many Generations." She has written extensively about Maine's complex relationship with seasonal visitors and the state's identity as "Vacationland," noting that Maine's appeal to urbanites seeking seasonal purification dates back to the years following the Civil War.
Career
The Believer and others
Julavits wrote the article "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!"[5] (subtitled "A Call For A New Era Of Experimentation, and a Book Culture That Will Support It") in the debut issue of The Believer, a publication that attempts to avoid snarkiness and "give people and books the benefit of the doubt."[6]
In 2005, she told The New York Times Magazine culture writer A.O. Scott how she decided on The Believer's tone: "I really saw 'the end of the book' as originating in the way books are talked about now in our culture and especially in the most esteemed venues for book criticism. It seemed as though their irrelevance was a foregone conclusion, and we were just practicing this quaint exercise of pretending something mattered when of course everyone knew it didn't." She added that her own aim as book critic would be "to endow something with importance, by treating it as an emotional experience."[7]
She has also written short stories, such as "The Santosbrazzi Killer", first published in The Lifted Brow and then republished in Harper's Magazine.
Novels
Julavits is the author of four novels: The Mineral Palace (2000), about which Library Journal wrote, "the writing is superb";[8]The Effect of Living Backwards (2003); The Uses of Enchantment (2006), which The New Yorker called "a sophisticated meditation on truth and bias"[9] and Publishers Weekly described as "beautifully executed";[10] and The Vanishers (2012), which won the PEN New England Fiction Award.
Nonfiction
Julavits co-edited Women in Clothes (2014) with Sheila Heti and Leanne Shapton. The book is about how the clothing women wear defines and shapes their lives, and features the voices of 639 women of all nationalities.
Julavits is the author of the book The Folded Clock: A Diary (2015), which the Los Angeles Times described as "an engaging portrait of a woman's sense of identity, which continually shape-shifts with time."[11]
Her most recent book is Directions to Myself: A Memoir of Four Years (2023), the third in what she describes as a trilogy of nonfiction books that attempt to redefine "memoir" as an act of personal, philosophical, and ideological investigation. The first book, The Folded Clock, concerned questions of time; the second, Directions to Myself, focuses on disorientation.
Essays and journalism
Julavits has written extensively for major publications, including essays for The New York Times Magazine. Her 2024 essay about building a fence at her Maine home explored themes of belonging, local identity, and the complex dynamics between year-round residents and seasonal visitors in small Maine communities. The piece examined how a simple home improvement project became a lens for understanding Maine's relationship with tourism, property rights, and community norms in a town where "zoning ordinances are few."
Personal life
Julavits lives in Maine and Manhattan with her husband, the writer Ben Marcus, and their children.[1][12] The family owns a house in a small Maine town of about 830 residents that more than doubles in size during the summer. Julavits has written about the experience of being both a Maine native and a seasonal resident, describing the unique perspective this gives her on the state's tourism-dependent economy and cultural dynamics.
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