‘The Folded Clock,’ by Heidi Julavits

nytimes.com - The self, a friend once informed me, is an illusion. We were 19 at the time, and he was reading Foucault, but that was 18 years ago, and now he doesn’t think he understood Foucault back then. “It’s real,” my friend says of the self, “but it’s made.”

Whether or not the self is real or an illusion, made or found, we do know that the self we encounter in a book, even if that book is a diary, is a made thing. And not every keeper of a diary is capable of creating a self on the page. Many diaries are, in fact, remarkably devoid of any evidence of self.