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A Fundamentally Absurd Question: Talking with “Motherhood” Author Sheila Heti | Los Angeles Review of Books

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I FIRST READ Sheila Heti’s new novel Motherhood during a period when my five-month-old baby was waking often in the night. In my state of rabid exhaustion, I found the skepticism Heti deploys toward childbearing in the book utterly contagious. A stream of questions that explore the topic of having a child and making art forms much of the basis of Motherhood’s narrative. In the style of consulting the I Ching, Heti’s unnamed narrator often poses these questions — comical and kaleidoscopic riffs that address the direction both her future and the book in process should take — to coin tosses. There are also extended scenes with a psychic and a Tarot reader. 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. As opposed to the way motherhood is presented in a text like Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts (2015), which injects the maternal with sex an

A Fundamentally Absurd Question: Talking with “Motherhood” Author Sheila Heti Kate Wolf interviews “Motherhood” author Sheila Heti. By Kate Wolf May 7, 2018 Fiction Gender & Sexuality Did you know LARB is a reader-supported nonprofit? LARB publishes daily without a paywall as part of our mission to make rigorous, incisive, and engaging writing on every aspect of literature, culture, and the arts freely accessible to the public. Help us continue this work with your tax-deductible donation today! Donate I FIRST READ Sheila Heti’s new novel Motherhood during a period when my five-month-old baby w

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