Identity is a recurrent theme in Heidi Julavits' novels. In life, she balances several distinct identities. Best known as the author of short stories and novels, Julavits teaches, raises her three-year-old daughter and is a co-founding editor of a forward-looking monthly review magazine, The Believer. "I definitely feel like I get to wear a different hat everyday depending on my mood," Julavits says, "Each thing that I do informs the other things and I never really get tired of anything."
The Uses of Enchantment is as multifaceted as her life. It has three points of view, three different time periods, one character who behaves like three, and themes of witchcraft, fairy tales, and Freud. Listening to the audio, you wonder how and where Julavits began. "Like most of my books, it started with a novel I threw away,"Julavits says. Two-thirds of the way complete, she scraped almost everything, asking the advice of a "valuable first reader" who suggested she begin with a "what might have happened" perspective when the sixteen year-old protagonist goes missing for several weeks.
"I decided that perspective would run all the way through the book. I started over, wrote that first section and the book started rolling forward." Julavits wrote from beginning to end, braiding together the three time periods, never tiring of the story line, or perspective. "I renewed my energy every time I moved onto a new viewpoint."
She was excited about the adaptation to audio and hoped the mystery would help. "The books I most like to listen to have a cliff-hanger element that keeps me awake on long drives. Her favorite was Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the action-packed non-fiction book on which Moby Dick was based.
Julavitz wondered how having a character that appears in three guises, might challenge the reader "How do you make this person seem like the same person and yet three different people?" Shelly Fraiser succeeds marvelously and also fulfills Julavits' hopes about dialogue.
"Dialogue is something I adore. You get over your adverb tick if your dialogue is working!" The most powerful dialogues occur between Mary and her psychiatrist, Dr. Hammer. "In the Freudian context I went wild with double entendres. I hoped that dialogue would retain its snappiness in the audio." Again she knew the actor would face a challenge as the double entendres voiced by the characters had to "say things and not say things at the same time." As she wrote, she read these dialogues aloud "making sure that things were leading you in one direction, but not insisting you went that direction." As Julavits hoped, Frasier dramatizes these dialogues to their full potential.
Fraisers' nuances bring depth to the characters, another of Julavits' wishes. For example, she explains, "Doctor Hammer is really trying to listen, but is a narcissist and can't listen. I wanted all the characters to be sympathetic. Sometimes they're aggressive and hostile and other times, they're vulnerable. I wanted everyone to be hard to like, but impossible to hate."
Julavits is amazed at what audio can do. "Right now I'm listening non-stop to The Princess and the Pea. It's really interesting how, even in a children's book, you can pick up influences you might not find while reading."