Background

Heidi Julavits was born on April 20, 1968, in Portland, Maine. She is the daughter of an attorney and a teacher.

Education

After graduating from Deering High School, Heidi Julavits attended Dartmouth College, where she earned a degree in 1990. Besides, she graduated from Columbia University, where she received a Master of Fine Arts in 1996.

Career

After education, Heidi Julavits headed to Japan afterward, spending four months there before traveling around Asia. Back in the States, she settled in San Francisco and found a job as a copywriter for Esprit, the clothing company, in the early 1990s. Then she returned to the East Coast to enroll in the graduate writing program at Columbia University, which she finished in 1996.

Heidi Julavits spent the next few years participating in writers' workshops to perfect her prose and waited tables at a Manhattan restaurant called Alison on Dominick in the late 1990s. Friends from the Columbia writing program introduced her to Dave Eggers, who acquired Julavits' short story, Marry the One Who Gets There First, a comic account of a rivalry between two sisters that reaches a crescendo as one is about to be married at an Idaho resort. The story appeared in the April 1998 issue of Esquire and generated a great deal of buzz, which led to an offer from G. P. Putnam's Sons, the publishing house. Using a literary agent, Julavits sold a novel and the rights to a second one to Putnam for $500,000, which earned the newcomer her fair share of notoriety in literary circles for the generosity of the contract.

Heidi Julavits's debut novel, The Mineral Palace, was published in 2000. Its story centers around a young bride in the 1930s, Bena Jonssen, who moves to Pueblo, Colorado, with her physician husband, and Julavits based some of the tales on her own grandmother's real-life experience. Worried about her listless new baby and haunted by a chance roadside encounter with a woman that Bena believes to be the female half of notorious bank robbers Bonnie and Clyde, the unhappy young wife channels her energies into restoring a long-shuttered tourist attraction in Pueblo, the Mineral Palace, that dated back to the town's mining heyday 50 years earlier.

The publication of Heidi Julavits's second novel was delayed by a catastrophe of epic proportions. She had completed the story of two sisters trapped on a hijacked plane just weeks before the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. She had to rewrite some sections of it and decided to set it in the near-distant future in which characters make oblique reference to an earlier hijacking.

The Effect of Living Backwards appeared finally in 2003 and marked a sharp turn in tone from The Mineral Palace. It was a return to the black humor evident in her stellar Esquire debut and also featured a pair of sisters on the eve of one's wedding. Alice and Edith are on a flight that will take them to the latter's wedding in Morocco to a wealthy Spanish man. As their hostage situation drags on, they cajole their fellow passengers into passing the time playing Alice and Edith's favorite childhood "game," which involves telling what they call "shame stories." The plot takes occasional detours into an entirely different story, set at the International Institute for Terrorist Studies in Switzerland, whose rival factions may or may not be staging the event that is delaying Alice and Edith.

Though Heidi Julavits's career as a novelist was firmly underway, she still turned in the occasional article for Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, and the New York Times. Confidential details about her admirably cautious spending habits, however, were revealed in an article her ex-husband wrote for the New York Times in the fall of 2000, about a year after their divorce. In it, former magazine editor and food writer Manny Howard, whom she had married in 1997, confessed that he had siphoned $6,000 out of their joint savings account when she was still waiting tables and working on her first novel. He finally told her about it, but Julavits had been keeping an eye on the account and watched it dwindle without asking him about it.

Heidi Julavits married another author, Ben Marcus, who was part of a burgeoning new American literary scene centered around Eggers, his wife Vendela Vida, and several other up-and-comers in their early 30s. Eggers financed the literary journal that Julavits and Marcus founded in 2003, The Believer. Its inaugural issue featured Julavits' 10,000-essay "Rejoice! Believe! Be Strong and Read Hard!" which caused a stir in book-publishing and media circles for its attack on reviewers of modern fiction and what she saw as literary preening. She also used the word "snark" to characterize the negativity of some.

Heidi Julavits's third novel, The Uses of Enchantment, was published in 2006. The story centers on Mary Veal, a young woman who disappears for several days from her Massachusetts boarding school one day in 1985. Mary's fascination, however, with the disappearance of another Semmering Academy student a dozen years earlier, who had been abducted and assaulted, seems to trouble the two therapists who are helping unravel what really happened.

To date, Heidi Julavits continues to writing. Besides, she teaches at Columbia University.

Achievements

• Heidi Julavits is best known as a writer and editor. She is a co-founder of The Believer magazine. Besides, Julavits is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a finalist for the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, and winner of the PEN New England Award for her writing, The Vanishers, in 2013.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Folded Clock

    (A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendshi...)

    2015
  • The Uses of Enchantment

    (In the late afternoon on November 7, 1985, sixteen-year-o...)

    2006
  • The Effect of Living Backwards

    (Heidi Julavits presents a quirky, compelling novel about ...)

    2003
  • Women in Clothes

    (Women in Clothes is a book unlike any other. It is, essen...)

    2012
  • The Mineral Palace 2000
  • The Vanishers 2012

Views

Quotations: "I don't know what many critics believe when it comes to literature. At worst, I fear that book reviews are just an opportunity for a critic to strive for humor, and to appear funny and smart, and a little bit bitchy, without attempting to espouse any higher ideals, or even to try to understand, on a very localized level, what a certain book is trying to do, even if it does it badly. This is wit for wit's sake, or, hostility for hostility sake."

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Jeff Giles: "Julavits such a gifted, visceral writer that even her most painful visions can be beautiful to behold."

Interests

• Writers

  John Saul

Connections

Heidi Julavits married Manny Howard in 1997 and divorced in 1999. Then she married Ben Marcus in 2002. They have two children.

Ex-husband:

Manny Howard

Manny Howard is a food writer. He was Heidi Julavits's first husband. They divorced in 1999.

husband:

Ben Marcus

Ben Marcus is Heidi Julavits's second husband. He is currently the author of four books of fiction.

colleague:

Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers is an American author, publisher, and literacy advocate whose breakout memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, was followed by other fiction and nonfiction successes. He also founded the publishing house McSweeney's in 1998.