★ 02/26/2018
The subject of the new novel from Heti (How Should a Person Be?) is neither birth nor child-rearing, but the question of whether to want a child, which the unnamed narrator calls “the greatest secret I keep from myself.” To find the answer, she practices techniques cribbed from the I Ching, consults a psychic and Tarot cards, contemplates her mother’s experiences as a woman, counts her periods, and considers freezing her eggs. In the meantime, she and her partner, Miles, are going through a rough patch, only partly due to her indecision, which is exacerbated by visits with her friends (all of whom seem to have newborn babies), recurrent and bittersweet fantasies of raising a family, and her knowledge that she is reaching the end of the window when maternity is possible. A book of sex (the real, unsensational kind), mood swings, and deep feminist thought, this volume is essentially a chronicle of vacillating ruminations on this big question. Although readers shouldn’t go in expecting clean-cut epiphanies, this lively, exhilaratingly smart, and deliberately, appropriately frustrating affair asks difficult questions about women’s responsibilities and desires, and society’s expectations. (May)
Named a Best Book of the Year by:
The New York Times • Vulture (#1 of 2018) • NPR • Chicago Tribune • Bustle • Lit Hub • Refinery29 • Financial Times • The Times Literary Supplement • Bookforum Top Shelf
Shortlisted for the Giller Prize
“Sheila Heti’s book seems likely to become the defining literary work on the subject . . . It’s hard to do justice to its complexity. This is less a book than a tapestry—a finely wrought work of delicate art.”
—Lara Feigel, The Guardian
“Deeply impressive . . . The book’s focus is not doing, but thinking, and the great pleasure it offers is that of a mind reflecting, obsessively and unpredictably, on a subject so central that it leads in every direction. For in writing about motherhood, Heti is also writing about femininity and vocation, embodiment and mortality, history and freedom.”
—Adam Kirsch, The Atlantic
“A provocative work that probes the new norms of femininity . . . Compelling . . . Wondrous.”
—Daphne Merkin, O Magazine
“Earthy and philosophical and essential . . . Motherhood floats, as did Heti’s excellent novel How Should a Person Be? (2012), somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. It reads like an inspired monologue . . . Heti’s semi-fiction, like that of writers like Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk and Teju Cole, among others, is dismantling our notions of what a novel should be.”
—Dwight Garner, The New York Times (named a "Top 10 of 2018")
“Unique . . . By devoting so many pages to her conflicted, sometimes contradictory thought process, Heti honors the weight of this singularly assigned-female decision, and lends power to those who make it—those who choose not to have children and those who do.”
—Katie Heaney, BuzzFeed News
"Goes beyond questions of genre, and could best be described as a philosophical essay in the tradition of Montaigne. As she ponders whether or not to have children, Heti thinks clearly and originally about profound issues of vocation, responsibility, identity and what it means to be true to oneself. Spending time in the company of a serious mind is one of the chief pleasures of fiction, and that is what Motherhood provides."—The Times Literary Supplement
“Heti is at her best—her sharpest and funniest—when she writes about why having a child doesn’t appeal to her, cutting against saccharine commonplaces about the importance of child-rearing.”
—Elaine Blair, The New York Times Book Review
“Expansive . . . Meditative and playful . . . Motherhood treats the question of whether to become a mother and what it means to take on that responsibility with the seriousness and complexity it deserves . . . Heti’s important book is a positive assertion that motherhood is not an obligatory sacrifice, a glorified institution, the cornerstone of a woman’s being. Motherhood is—or should be—a choice, with each woman accorded the freedom to decide what it means.”
—Polly Rosenwaike, San Francisco Chronicle
“Utterly contagious . . . Comical and kaleidoscopic . . . In the novel’s most powerful passages, the narrator confronts the possibility of maternity by herself, wondering if a life that does not include being a mother can be defined by means other than lack . . . An inventively crafted novel about the complications of being a human being with competing or contradictory desires . . . Powerful . . . Darkly funny, but also kind of heartbreaking.”
—Kate Wolf, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Searingly honest . . . In urgent, first-person prose, Heti contrasts societal expectation with personal desire . . . Starkly intimate . . . The book’s sneaky power lies in a profound question that lacks an answer: How should a mother be?”
—David Canfield, Entertainment Weekly
“The title of Heti’s latest work of autofiction—a fashionable hybrid of essay, memoir, and novel—should properly end in a question mark like her last book, How Should a Person Be? . . . Heti’s aggressively ruminative avatar documents parenthood in her demographic as though it were a distant continent in a world without jet travel: the crossing would be perilous and irreversible, and require a lot of unpacking.”
—Boris Kachka, Vulture
“Motherhood is an exhibition of Heti’s freedom.”
—Willa Paskin, Slate
“Heti deploys a stream of consciousness style of prose, which often strikes gold . . . An interesting tug-of-war to bear witness to: A successful writer’s internal battle regarding what should be done with the rest of her life. She reaches into every crevice of her brain, her soul, her womb, to pull out some semblance of a driving force behind her decision to have or not to have children.”
—Rachel Ellison, Bustle
“Original, insightful . . . Motherhood is such a powerful story, it’s as if she has to subvert the narrative logic of both novel and memoir to divine her true desires . . . It has also opened up a fruitful space for considering motherhood in all its complications . . . Terrifically funny and engaging.”
—Julie Phillips, 4Columns
“Heti’s book, like many of her novels, takes the mind as the primary setting, and thoughts are the major source of action: narrative arcs begin and end with the progress of her characters’ thinking, and the process by which they arrive at their conclusions. In Motherhood, this style suits the subject well—we’re brought so close to the narrator’s ongoing internal monologue that soon her thoughts start to feel like the reader’s.”
—Haley Mlotek, The Ringer
“Engrossing . . . Motherhood joins How Should a Person Be? and Women in Clothes to form what might be read as a field guide to womanhood in a particular literary-bohemian milieu . . . Motherhood, in this book, exists most of all as a force that shapes women’s lives and their relationships with one another. Heti approaches the subject with an observer’s curiosity more than a deliberate agenda.”
—Molly Fischer, New York Magazine
“Illuminating . . . Intimate . . . Poignant.”
—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker
“In Motherhood, Heti takes on her most controversial and private debate yet—whether or not to have a child. A brilliant, radical, and moving book, it is sure to cause the cultural riot her earlier work has . . . There’s a new quality to Heti’s writing in Motherhood. The only way I can describe it is tenderness . . . Beautiful . . . Surprising.”
—Claudia Dey, The Paris Review
“Motherhood goes deeper than simple yes or no answers. Heti wants to give women permission to take this question [of whether or not to have a child] seriously . . . One of the most powerful parts of Motherhood is that it doesn’t pit women against each other; instead, it creates an ongoing dialogue . . . invigorating.”
—Michele Filgate, Publishers Weekly (interview)
“The book is a painterly examination of [Heti’s] psyche—a Rorschach blot of inborn pressures and the exuberant autonomy that threatens them . . . Add love letter to the list of what Motherhood is . . . She tracks a clear trajectory of matriarchal pain . . . Sensuous and velvety.”
—Monica Uszerowicz, BOMB Magazine
“How can I be sure that I want to have a child? Motherhood—a tortured, honest novel—is the Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s attempt to answer this impossible question . . . Her creative process doubles as an attempt to work out her own feelings on the subject . . . The result is a book that is eclectic and compelling, a rare account of how a woman might sidestep what is, for many, a defining life event: the birth of a child.”
—Maggie Doherty, The New Republic
“Here is finally is. A book for all of you who are considering having a baby, who had a baby, who didn’t have a baby, who didn’t want a baby, who don’t know what they want but the clock is ticking anyway. This topic is finally tackled as if it were the most important decision in your life. Because, um. How lucky are we that one of our foremost thinkers took this upon herself, for years, in real time, wrestling every day and living to tell. So fucking ready to live in the world this book will help make. Read and discuss, discuss, discuss.”
—Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man
“An emotionally complex novel about motherhood that isn’t about children. An intricately constructed book based on games of chance. This feels new.”
—Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
“A provocative, creative, and triumphant work of philosophical feminist fiction . . . Heti writes with courage, curiosity, and uncommon truth.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Charismatic and beguilingly original . . . oddly compelling . . . Sheila is funny, and idiosyncratic enough to rub contra to 2018, a time when the litmus test for a woman’s success is the extent to which her daily planner is a subject of marvel . . . A joy to read.”
—Bookforum
“I deeply enjoyed Sheila Heti’s fractal, meticulous, and twinklingly self-aware book—in which every part seemed to know, and be informed by, every other part—about art and time and change and books and babies. Motherhood synergistically functions both as an intimate, moving, autobiographical novel and as a practical, mysterious, five-year tool used by its protagonist to help her contemplate and answer central questions in her life."—Tao Lin, author of Shoplifting from American Apparel and Taipei
“This lively, exhilaratingly smart, and deliberately, appropriately frustrating affair asks difficult questions about women’s responsibilities and desires, and society’s expectations.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Heti is always original.”
—Library Journal
“This inquiry into the modern woman’s moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response—finally—to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I’ve read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself.”
—Rachel Cusk, author of Outline and Transit
“I read this novel more quickly and eagerly than any I’ve read in ages. Sheila Heti’s simple, elegant sentences invariably give pleasure; her thinking is incisive and wholly original as she grapples with the kind of unhappiness that many of us, myself included, prefer to distract ourselves from rather than look at squarely. Reading Motherhood forced me to become a little more honest with myself.”
—Adelle Waldman, author of The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.
“Reading this beautiful novel, I felt I was watching a brilliant mind invent new tools for thinking. Sheila Heti wrings revelation from the act of asking, again and again, in ever more challenging and innovative ways, impossible questions of existence. Motherhood is a thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving book.”
—Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“The book Sheila Heti’s Motherhood reminds me of the most is Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, except that the agonizing decision is whether to create a child, and not whether to destroy one—but it’s that good, and that crazy-making. I’ve never seen anyone write about the relationship between childlessness, writing, and mother’s sadnesses the way Sheila Heti does. I know Motherhood is going to mean a lot to many different people—fully as much so as if it was a human that Sheila gave birth to—though in a different and in fact incommensurate way. That’s just one of many paradoxes that are not shied away from in this courageous, necessary, visionary book.”
—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and The Possessed
“With each of her novels, Sheila Heti invents a new novel form. Motherhood is a riveting story of love and fate, a powerful inspiration to reflect, and a subtle depiction of the lives of contemporary women and men, by an exceptional artist in the prime of her powers. Motherhood constitutes its own genre within the many-faceted novel of ideas. Heti is like no one else.”
—Mark Greif, author of Against Everything
“A refreshingly contemporary examination of an ageless subject.”
—Sue Carter, Toronto Star
2018-02-20
Canadian fiction writer Heti (How Should a Person Be?, 2012, etc.) delves into the vexed question of motherhood and what the choice between having or not having a child means, culturally and personally.The novel opens with a series of questions that are answered by the flipping of three coins in an I Ching-based technique. A note at the beginning assures the reader that "while not everything in books is true, in this book, all results from the flipping of coins are true." Worryingly, the first question posed is: "Is this book a good idea?" "Yes," the coins reply. The narrator is a published writer filled with anguish and uncertainty about the possibility of motherhood, among other things. In addition to flipping coins for the answers to questions such as "What should I be worried about? My soul?" and "Should I begin to personify this demon that brings me bad dreams?" she consults a psychic, has a tarot reading, and talks with friends, reporting every mood, dream, worry, and conversation. There are photographs and descriptions of the writing process. The author is a writer and so is the narrator! What is fiction, and what is truth?! But no amount of metafictional smoke and mirrors can make up for the absence of a compelling story. Eventually she goes on medication. "The drugs really seem to be working....Yet I fear I don't have the right to speak anymore, given these drugs. I can't pretend I have come to any answers, or any great realizations, because I am taking these drugs. I think the drugs are the reason I am feeling less bad." "Am I annoyed?" she continues. "Am I disappointed? A little bit, yes. I wanted my own magic to get rid of the pain." Some readers may find this unfiltered self-absorption helpful. Others will remember the question posed at the book's beginning and conclude that the I Ching is not the best arbiter of literary merit. "What kind of story is created when a person goes down, down, down and down—but instead of breaking through and seeing the truth and ascending, they go down, then they take drugs, and then they go up?" If you have to ask....It's one thing to have the reader's sympathy and another to hold the reader's interest.
