Sheila Heti

It's a book way out of the realm of my typical reads. A book I would never had picked up on my own at a bookstore had I simply glanced it on a shelf. It took a booktuber to make me notice it.

What was it about this book that made me decide to pick it up? It was a curiosity. A curiosity to see if Sheila Heiti could manage to capture my feelings. You see, the book is about a woman in her 30s who is trying to cope with the idea that she might not want to have a child. The narrator is a writer, show more with a boyfriend she believes to love, and a life she seems more or less content with. But she can't shake off the feeling that she is supposed to be doing more, to be producing more, or maybe is supposed to be producing.. something. She spends the book using coin-flipping to help make decisions when questioning her relationship with her boyfriend, her friends, her unborn potential child, her mother, and to herself. She debates whether she is deceiving everyone, just herself, or if she is the one being deceived. It's a constant back and forth between trying to convince herself that she wants a child, or that she should want a child, and right when she decides she does indeed want a child she goes right back to wondering if this is her decision or the decision society is making for her.

It's a story about indecision, desire, contradiction, obligation and it's all done with a blatant honesty. There are no romantic notions, the sex is blunt and the narrator's back-and-forth can get tiring but that's what makes the book a success.

Because I am also a woman in her 30s who is trying to cope with the idea that I might not want a child. And this book captures my feelings in more ways that I can say.

Saying that you don't want a child can seem like a simple enough decision but in all honesty it's a decision encased with indecision, and fear, and hesitation, and shame. It's hard to look at your friends and understand their excitement as they get pregnant and have children. It's hard to understand why you could care less about having a baby placed in your arms. I never in my youth had a desire to name my future children and as an adult I never got the warmth of emotion that accompanies many women when they see babies. Some babies are cute, yes, but that is rational statement I am making. If a baby is legitimately cute, then I can't rationally deny its cuteness just because of my lack of maternal affection. But I can't pretend that all babies are magically beautiful and innocent and pure just because they are in a state of baby-ness.

Some readers criticized the narrator's wallowing and inability to make a decision and her wishy-washy-ness but Heiti captured that feeling so tremendously well. I have also tried to change my mind due to my circumstances, make excuses as to why maybe now I don't want a baby but obviously I'll want one in the future because of course that should be my innate desire as a woman. I've tried to persuade myself that I didn't want a baby because I was too young too married, I wasn't yet on the right career course, I didn't have enough money to provide for a child yet, I didn't have the right partner. Maybe once I found the right man, I would want to have a child with him. Even if I didn't necessarily want a child myself, if the man I loved did, maybe I could do this thing for him. Maybe love would make me want to have a child.

See? It's so easy to come up with excuses.

Then the narrator reflects on her relationship with her mother and wonders if something in that relationship might have led to her lack of maternal instinct. She notes how her mother also seems to be more occupied with looking out for her own mother than she did her own child. It's a culture of looking back instead of forward, the narrator seems to conclude. And from that I looked at my own family and noticed a similar pattern. My grandmother admits that she was never born to be a mother, despite having had four children. She did because that's what one did back then. It was a product of the times. But she really wished she could have stayed wild longer, stayed unmarried longer. My grandmother once even told me that if she had been born in my generation she would have fun with men, an option not available to her. My own mother has always complained about her mother's lack of motherly attention.

Now, I didn't lack in motherly attention as my mother was an amazing woman but in my eyes she was amazing for so many more things other than just being a mother. It was my mother's intelligence, charisma, intelligence, strong sense of self that made me idolize her. But my mother also has never been one to dote on others' children. She loved her own children of course but never really cared for others. She has never requested grandchildren and certainly has never really expressed an interest in becoming a grandmother. Only in the last month have we discovered that my brother is going to have a child, her first (and quite possibly only) grandchild, and as we discussed our future travel plans she said that she guessed she'll have to go visit the kid at its birth to support her son.

So my mother having been such a tremendous role model for me, was her lack of interest in babies also conditioned in me? Is this reason I seem to just not care.

Such thoughts this book guided me through it almost seemed like the book was written for me and that's why I was captivated by the book. Even if the writing style was a bit more experimental and "contemporary" than I tend to like my books, the message was powerful.

The other day I had an appointment at the gynecologist's office. The five years had passed on my IUD and it was time to get it replaced. I spent the last year questioning my IUD. Should I get a new one? If I do, should I keep the same five year one? Maybe I should get the the three year one. Maybe I should switch back to a non semi-permanent option? The question is, why was I asking myself these questions? It was all a way to ask myself do I want a baby? Do I want to prepare myself for maybe having a baby?

That night after the appointment (I did decide to stick with same IUD), I had a dream. I was looking at a male figure, my partner, and looked down at my arms and saw a baby. I smiled and tucked the blanket under its arms. Then I placed the baby down to my left, engaged in conversation with a woman to my right, and when I looked back to my left, the baby was sinking into a mud hole. And I just watched as it sank and sank and sank, the mud enveloping its small body.

---

Nobody looks at a childless gay couple and thinks their life must lack meaning or depth or substance because they didn't have kids. No one looks at a couple of guys who have been together forever, love each other, are happy in their work, have chosen not to have kids, and probably still fucking, and pities them; or thinks that deep down inside they must know they're living a trivial and callow life because they're not fathers. Nobody thinks that! [...] It's only straight couples people have these feelings about -- how empty their lives must be. No, actually, it's not even the man -- people look at him like he got away with something. It's just the woman -- the woman who doesn't have a child is looked at with the same aversion and reproach as a grown man who doesn't have a job. Like she has something to apologize for. Like she's not entitled to pride. show less

everything I ever felt, the perfect exorcism for my soul
Sheila Heti has such great mood swings that just scream ME, I'm shocked she's not a cancer

on a more serious note...
From Sheila's poetic ramblings, I learnt that the contemplation of motherhood is a real thing, much more so than actual mothering itself. By twirling the idea of it in your mind, at once you are confronted by a dozen strains of suppositions & truths--biological truth (psychotic effects of the menstrual cycle), your show more conception of motherhood shaped by the lineage of mothers you come from, the feminist's truth, your life philosophies, your partner's philosophies, gossips, peer pressure, politics and more. Anyone who has struggled with these ideologies have experienced motherhood in its purest form (no less than real mothers who some might not have even given much thought to the act of child-rearing). Whether one ends up being a real mother or not (the decision being a negligible forgone conclusion while the process is everything), anyone who goes through this soul-wrenching, hormone-bitching, existential process of 'motherhood' to an enlightening/bleak/apathetic end can be said to have lived an examined, thorough, worthy life. show less

Sheila Heti appreciates and exploits the flexibility of the novel. Her latest book is an unconventional, even peculiar one —by turns stimulating, frustrating, and affecting. There’s a rough, unfinished feel to it, and parts are quite opaque. Deceptively simple prose and a third-person telling sometimes make the novel read like a fable for children, but there are mythopoeic elements and long fantastical, surreal stretches as well, where the book moves beyond the fabulistic. I sometimes show more wondered if the author wasn’t a bit mad.

The novel’s focus is the death of the protagonist Mira’s father. Soon after his last breath is taken, she feels his spirit enter into her. She describes this experience in sexual terms, using the word “ejaculated.” Later, Mira inhabits a leaf and carries on a series of conversations with her dead parent, covering such topics as the afterlife (what it’s like to be dead, to have shed one’s body and personhood); the role of art; and the fate of an ever-warming planet, our current civilization, and humanity itself. I interpreted the protagonist’s experience as her entering a kind of vegetative psychological state in which the mind continues to work at a deep, subconscious level. A leaf functions metabolically, using light to make energy, but is incapable of autonomous action, forming a plan, or purposefully engaging with life. It’s an apt metaphor for early bereavement, and Heti rightly portrays it as a potentially dangerous state from which a person may need to be pulled by another.

Early in the novel we’re told that the world in which the characters find themselves is imperfect, God’s first draft, one that He’s almost finished writing. Flawed as it is, this world has a vitality and an intensity that may be edited out in subsequent versions. It is said to be populated by different types of people or “critics”, who hatch from one of three types of egg, reflecting different aspects of God. First, there are the flighty, fragile “birds”, interested in beauty, order, harmony, and meaning, who critique from above. Next are the “fish”, whose outlook from the middle of the action is communal and whose aim is to fix what ails society. Finally, we have the “bears”, who are in the thick of things, cradling loved ones in their arms. Family and tradition matter most to this type. Mira, the central character, is a bird. Annie, a detached, rather ethereal being whom Mira loves but cannot quite connect with, is a fish, and Mira’s father, whose entire life has been built around her (to the point that she’s feared being engulfed by him) is a bear. Mira is required to resolve what constitutes the right degree of distance between herself and others, and to come to terms with the death of her father.

Though it’s not explicitly stated, Toronto is the recognizable setting of the novel. The time frame is vague and shifting. We see Mira as both a young and a middle-aged woman, but ordinary markers of human time figure very little in the novel. There is also precious little plot, and Heti’s characters are thin, more spiritual concepts than bodies in a material world. This is a novel of ideas and emotions, and its themes are ones more frequently encountered in poetry than in fiction.

The language is loose, inexact, sometimes slippery. I’ll admit I wasn’t always sure what Heti was talking about. Her refusal to indent and punctuate the long stretches of “leafy” father-daughter dialogue didn’t help matters. Ultimately, however, I was impressed and moved by the book. I often complete novels and feel no particular urge to find out what other readers think about them. This one is an exception. Rich and strange, certainly open to interpretation, it’s a fictional work that begs to be discussed with others.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with a free digital copy.

Rating: 3.5 rounded up show less

Leaf Me Alone
Review of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover edition (February 15, 2022) with reference to the Kindle eBook.

She felt so alone in those days. Not that she minded. It is only when you get older that everyone makes you feel bad about being alone, or implies that spending time with other people is somehow better, because it proves you to be likeable.
But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so she could

show more

hear herself living.

[3.5 rounded up]
There were so many beautiful passages about solitude, love, grief, loss, death and rebirth (reawakening) in Pure Colour that I added an eBook edition in addition to my hardcover in order to make noting them easier. You can see many of those in either my status updates below or in My Kindle Notes & Highlights.

Despite that evocative writing, Pure Colour is a challenging read as it has a middle section where the protagonist and her dead father live inside a tree leaf for an extended number of pages. The protagonist Mira is initially attending a school (for critics) and working part-time in a lamp store and falls in love with a character named Annie. She leaves that behind to care for her dying father after whose passing the 'magic realism' section begins. After a period of time she returns to life and to Annie.

There is humour and sadness throughout this book and overall I did quite enjoy it. But I do understand that it would likely be a difficult read for most if you are not prepared to accept its spiritual and metaphysical aspects. Best to read them symbolically I think.

I read Pure Colour through being introduced to it at the 2023 Lakefield Literary Festival. At the Festival, Heti gave the background to the novel as being about her processing the death of her own father.

See photograph at https://scontent-ord5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/360093745_24345228695075920_1...
Author Sheila Heti (centre) in discussion with moderator Johanna Schneller (left) and author Harley Rustad Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas (2022)) at the 2023 Lakefield Literary Festival, Canada.

Soundtrack
Inspired more by my lede once I had decided on it, but I couldn't help but listen to Traffic's Light Up or Leave Me Alone from Low Spark of High Heeled Boys (1971) album, a favourite of mine from back in the day.

Other Reviews
Love, Philosophy and Foliage by Anne Enright, The Guardian, February 16, 2022.

Trivia and Link
The CBC Books page has an extensive series of audio podcasts with Sheila Heti including an interview about the publication of Pure Colour. Earlier postings include Heti answering the CBC's version of the Proust Questionnarie. You can access all of the podcasts here. show less