“It feels like there’s this river running underneath my whole life.
It’s always there; I just have to step into it.”
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Sheila Heti and I met at the Gladstone, a beautiful old hotel in the West Queen West neighborhood of Toronto, on a cold, snowy January weekend. She was warm, friendly, and generous; on her way to the hotel, she offered to bring me coffee and a croissant, and when she spilled some coffee on her new white pants, she sent me a string of charmingly self-deprecating texts about her attempts to remedy the situation, so that by the time she arrived, I felt that we were friends. In my hotel room, we drank our coffees, and later cocktails, and joked about the handprints on a rose-colored panel in the room, which we’d both attempted to push open, believing it to be a door. At some point early in our discussion, she told me that she once stayed at the Gladstone for several weeks after one of her previous residences caught fire. It was also where she held her first book-launch party, twenty-four years ago.
Heti was born in Toronto in 1976 to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents. Her mother was a pathologist and her father an electrical engineer; her younger brother is a stand-up comic. She has lived in the city for most of her life, though she briefly studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, before completing a bachelor’s degree in art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Now she shares an apartment, not far from the Gladstone, with her longtime boyfriend and dog. She is the author of eleven books, starting with a collection of contemporary fables called The Middle Stories, which features stories with titles like “The Moon Monologue” and “Mermaid in the Jar,” published when she was twenty-four. Though she has written nonfiction and children’s books, Heti is best known for her novels, which include How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood, Pure Colour, and, most recently, Alphabetical Diaries. Her accolades are many: How Should a Person Be? was named one of the “12 New Classics” of the 2000s by New York magazine; Motherhood was a New York Times “Critics’ Top Books of 2018” and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize; and Pure Colour won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award. She is the former interviews editor of this magazine, for which she interviewed numerous writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Agnès Varda, Mary Gaitskill, and Sophie Calle. Her work has been translated into twenty-seven languages.
Many of Heti’s books are formed through conversation and collaboration. How Should a Person Be?, about a group of young artists in Toronto and narrated by a playwright named Sheila, incorporates dialogue culled from recordings of Heti’s conversations with her friends, most centrally the painter and filmmaker Margaux Williamson. Women in Clothes, a New York Times–bestselling anthology coedited with Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton, collects work from hundreds of women on the theme of what they wear. Motherhood, a novel in which the narrator sets out to understand whether she wants to have a child, stages a conversation between herself and either chance or fate, depending on one’s perspective, which speaks through the mechanism of a coin toss. Alphabetical Diaries, comprising sentences drawn from ten years of Heti’s diaries and presented alphabetically, with the original chronology abandoned, becomes a conversation with the self across time.
Heti’s writing often directly tackles big philosophical questions about topics like art, selfhood, desire, our relationships to others, grief, and how a person should live. It is playful, probing, tender, and, in the words of Alexandra Kleeman, adept at capturing “the subtle expansiveness of an individual life.” Her work is also formally innovative and boundary-crossing: How Should a Person Be?, first published in 2010, is now considered an early example of autofiction. In the New York Times, David Haglund wrote of the book: “Sheila Heti [knows] something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I have read.” In 2018, the New York Times named her part of “The New Vanguard,” its list of writers “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the twenty-first century.” Her fearlessness and propensity to follow her own curiosity make her a perennially fascinating writer.
—Cara Blue Adams
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I. “MY WORLD WAS VERY SMALL”
THE BELIEVER: Since we’re in Toronto, I wanted to start by asking you about the city. You were born here. You’ve lived here most of your life. How has your relationship to Toronto changed?
SHEILA HETI: I loved growing up here. I don’t think that when you’re a kid, you really fantasize about other places where you might be growing up. Your home is just the only possible place, or at least that’s how I felt. But then in my twenties, I had a lot of angst about staying, and then I stayed. And in my forties again it’s become this of course sort of place, like, where else would I live?
Now we have a place a couple hours north of the city, so we’re here half the time and in the country half the time. I’m much less involved in the various art scenes, but in my twenties it was such a huge part of my life to go to people’s events and have my own events, to be interested in the cultural life of the city and how to make it better. Ultimately, I’m very happy I stayed. I don’t think I could have written in the same way if I’d been in another place.
BLVR: Did you ever live anywhere else for an extended period of time, and if so, did that have an effect on your work?
SH: I’ve done residencies, so that’s a month here and a month there. And I was in Montreal in my early twenties for about a year for school. I lived in New York for three months with a boyfriend who had a summer job there, and recently I spent a semester in New Haven, teaching at Yale. I travel a lot as a writer, too, to do readings and so on, so I feel like I’m always traveling in some way.
I went to Montreal for a few months around the time that I started to write How Should a Person Be? I think it was good to be able to be away from my friends and focus and read the Bible and feel lonely and rethink how I wanted to write. But I’m not sure if it was the city that changed me or just going anywhere, you know? Just getting out of my world for a little while.
BLVR: There’s something helpful about leaving your life behind.
SH: You’re not playing the same part that you’re usually playing in your life, which can keep you thinking in the same way and then writing in the same way.
BLVR: You studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, left that program, worked at a magazine for several years, and then went to the University of Toronto to study art and philosophy. What were your student days like?
SH: Theater school was a ball. It was my first time away from Toronto. I was eighteen. I got engaged within two months of being there. I just went crazy, you know? I guess getting engaged can be the opposite of going crazy, but for me, it was going crazy. It was totally wild to do that. I started doing drugs. I smoked pot every day. I’d never done drugs before. It was this program with three other writers, one of whom I’m still quite good friends with, Claudia Dey, and we just had so much time, so much freedom. There were very few classes. The school focused on the actors, and the playwrights were an afterthought. I was writing this weird adaptation of Faust and talking nonstop about art to my boyfriend, who was in the directing program. It was so great. I had no landline, so I wasn’t in touch with my family much.
BLVR: You had no landline?
SH: Yeah, for the first few months. I remember writing letters to friends back home, and it just feels like a whole other period in history.
The University of Toronto was different again. I was very isolated. I came back to Toronto with my boyfriend, and we broke up after a couple years, and then I went to university. I didn’t have any friends at that point—he had kept our theater friends. But it was also really wonderful. I spent all my time in this big university library called Robarts, thinking about art and artists. I remember thinking a lot about Jackson Pollock for some reason, just the way he used his body, how the art was like a record, a signature, of his body’s movements in space. I was really, really into school. I learned so much and thought so much about writing, and now I guess I romanticize how alone I felt. That’s when I was writing The Middle Stories and trying to figure out what my voice sounded like on the page, or what kind of rhythm my sentences made. I don’t know if I have ever since worked quite as intensely as I did then.
BLVR: It’s such a special time in life, when you’re young and you don’t have responsibilities, and you can be alone.
SH: Yes. I wasn’t on the internet. I had no phone… I was really profoundly alone. Even if I were just as free from responsibilities now, I wouldn’t be able to be that alone.
BLVR: I think sometimes about what it means for our culture to have lost that, for that to have slipped into history.
SH: Yeah. I’m amazed at how quickly culture changes. Even if I went totally offline and threw out my phone, I couldn’t recapture that time, for I would still know that this whole world of conversation was going on without me, whereas back then I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. My world was very small.
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