The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits

Heidi Julavits felt trapped. While vacationing in Germany with a friend, she reluctantly set out on a drive up a narrow, icy road. The further they travelled, the steeper and riskier the climb became. Terrified by her inability to change course -- the road had shrunken to the narrow width of the car -- she panicked. The potentials of the day had suddenly been reduced to a binary fate: they’d make it to their destination, or they wouldn’t. As soon as she was able to turn around, thanks to a widening near a tunnel, she did. In her new book, The Folded Clock: A Diary, she likens this incident to the experience of novel writing, an act she finds suffocating

When asked why she wanted to write a plotless story -- a diary -- Julavits said it felt true to how we live. 'I do feel like we move through space and information differently now,' she said. 'We do it every day. You’re linking. There’s a link. Everything has a link. There’s a link buried in whatever you’ve read. Things suddenly go off in these unexpected zig-zags through virtual spaces, which are kind of story spaces that you create for yourself as you navigate. There’s no plot to that. There is a type of linkage, but it’s a different type of linkage. That’s what I was trying to capture, or come to terms with.