A guide to autofiction – 2

Reading lists

A guide to autofiction

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Books to read if you’re expecting a baby

Motherhood

Likely to become the defining literary work on the subject.

Probing, psychologically unafraid, witty.

If you are an underliner, as I am, your pen may go dry . . . Indeed, Heti always seems to be drawing from a paranormally deep well.

Brave and funny... Heti demonstrates the contradictions between freedom and the tyranny of choice and how impossible it is for anyone to ever make the 'right' decision.

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.

Times Literary Supplement, **Books of the Year**

Motherhood confronts the philosophical questions raised by childbearing and womanhood... Heti's narrator wants to create - specifically, to create something that will honour the memory of her mother and grandmother... Motherhood both documents that desire and fulfils it.

Motherhood is a poetic, innovative book. It is groundbreaking in its fluidity, in its recognition of the unrecognizability of desire, and in its scrutiny of expectation… she introduces a critical, exhilarating freedom.

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.

Motherhood is subtitled A Novel, though it's one in which the boundaries between fiction and memoir are porous and constantly shifting… Heti is experimenting with literary form even as she wrestles with the form her adult life should take

Motherhood is a fiercely intelligent and probing read that delves deep into the fundamentals of procreating, motherhood and what it means to be a woman in today's world.

[Motherhood] embed[s] deeply philosophical questions into casual and familiar language… It is about the paralysis a person might feel when given the freedom to create, whether babies, books or oneself.

Motherhood is self-examination elevated to an art form… beautifully written and profound.

Illuminating . . . Intimate . . . Poignant.

Engrossing . . . Heti approaches the subject with an observer's curiosity.

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.

An emotionally complex novel about motherhood that isn't about children. An intricately constructed book based on games of chance. This feels new.

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.

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.

Here it 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.

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.

I think of Motherhood as a beautiful, natural, living thing - a rare tree in the car-filled parking lot of literature, offering aesthetic and sustainable pleasures while also bristling with multiple, helpful, compassionate functions in the world. The high stakes, complexity, intensity, playfulness, seriousness, and inter-dimensionality of Motherhood's synthesis of art and life, of the imagination and the universe, makes me excited about both life and literature. I recommend reading and rereading Motherhood.

Motherhood is a gesture towards honesty, bringing much that was dark into light. The book makes it more possible to think the decision, but also to dream, embody and feel it.

A celebration of life, expressed poignantly through her prose - which is playful, funny, ultimately moving.

I found it totally addictive and read it [Motherhood] in one go

A thoughtful, frank novel... Intellectual yet conversational, it's a meditation on responsibility and freedom, and the purpose of life itself. I found it extremely moving

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the 'New Classics' of the twenty-first century and which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her novels have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto and Kawartha Lakes, Ontario.

'A response - finally - to the new norms of femininity' Rachel Cusk 
 
Having reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti's narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance, she struggles to make a moral and meaningful choice. 
 
In a compellingly direct mode that straddles the forms of the novel and the essay, Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how - and for whom - to live. 
 
'Likely to become the defining literary work on the subject' Guardian 
'Courageous, necessary, visionary' Elif Batuman 
'Quietly affecting... As concerned with art as it is with mothering' Sally Rooney 
'Groundbreaking in its fluidity' Spectator 
 
**A Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Irish Times, Refinery29, TLS and The White Review Book of the Year **

Pure Colour

An impressive spectrum of meaning and feeling, both abstract and tangible... This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital.

Pure Colour is the apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker's song about the end of all things... There is also Heti's lovely prose to enjoy, her beautifully sustained tone, the way she is, as a writer, earnest, funny and sweet... Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times.

Exemplifies both originality and sharpness... the kind of book that you start reading again as soon as you finish it, to see how on earth the author pulled it off... Descriptions of grief that are so surprising and true they made me gasp.

Pure Colour is not just a novel, it's a creation myth, a fairy tale, a story about making art and living on this planet. A story about death and the irresistible inner stirrings that bring us back to life. Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius.

Wonderfully entertaining... a treat to read. Expect to take in the work of a true wordsmith.

What makes Heti's novels so compelling is... the questions her characters need answering at moments of flux in their lives... [Pure Colour] left me full of admiration and wonder.

An explicitly mystical book... So new...This book, so full of argument, feels weightless.

Just like that, there's magic. Like Iris Murdoch's novels, Heti's are philosophically intense, although Heti's work is pared down where Murdoch's was Rabelaisian. Heti owns a sharp axe. In Pure Colour the wood chips that fall are as interesting as the sculpture that gets made.

Buoyed by a dazzling assortment of questions, curiosities and wild propositions that betray the author's agile and untamed mind...[Pure Colour] brings into view a certain organic and ecstatic wholeness: bright splashes of feeling and folly, of grief and loss...[it] defies classification.

Heti excels at small moments, delicately revealed.

Heti is brilliant at nailing down universal cultural experiences.

A philosophical fable about art, death, faith and the perilous state of the universe.

It isn't often that a novel dares to rethink the order of the universe we live in, yet in Pure Colour, Sheila Heti aims for just that. Making new sense of our cracked world through a vulnerable meditation on love and art that feels both personal and cosmic, this is a book that takes good care of its reader, and heals.

The most timely, urgent book of 2022... It feels both as thrillingly inventive as [Heti's] ever been and also defiantly and satisfyingly middle-aged... Genius.

Pure Colour is unabashedly metaphysical and completely outlandish...Yet neither grief nor theology can suppress Heti's oddball wit and affection for wildly inappropriate sexual metaphors, for which a reader should be grateful... Heti is the rare mystic with a sense of humor.

Sheila Heti has the innate ability to capture feelings and thinkings that can seem so mercurial, and to provoke new avenues of thought on social codes, with challenge, care, and clarity. Her writing is both a relief and an invigoration.

Pure Colour will make you question life and choices in the same philosophical and lyrically written way.

Cosmopolitan, *Books to Look Our For 2022*

Heti has evolved the leanest, more powerful, playful, and entirely unique form for writing ideas. With one foot in the everyday and another in the floating world, Pure Colour is a pure feat.

Pure Colour...[is] a honed gem, a surreal bildungsroman... With its philosophical meditations, poetic vignettes and absurdist comedy, it is...a bracing reminder that the novel is the literary form where a writer is free to do anything... Heti...[is] an original and influential voice in contemporary fiction

Heti's... writing is beguiling, funny and wise. The novel's surreal elements invite as many interpretations as an abstract painting

Heti's work is always original - that Pure Colour is also deeply moving makes it all the more remarkable

New Statesman, *The best books of 2022 so far*

A philosophical novel as timely as the fictions of Camus and Hesse were for another generation. Heti's voice, however, is entirely her own: bold, searching, hilarious, simultaneously artful and artless... her grandest...novel yet

Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year*

I’ve read Pure Colour by Sheila Heti three times… It was a revelation, it completely changed the way I thought a novel could be and do

** SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2023** 
** WINNER OF THE 2022 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD IN FICTION** 
 
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, and more 
 
What if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed? 
 
In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal - to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters that strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up. 
 
Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling and a shape-shifting epic that is celestially bright and streaked with beauty. 
 
'Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius.' Avni Doshi 
 
'This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital.' Observer 
 
'An original, a book that says something new for our difficult times.' Anne Enright, Guardian 
 
'A treat.' Stylist 
 
 
_______________________ 
 
PRAISE FOR SHEILA HETI: 
'Exhilarating...it made me want to write' Sally Rooney, on How Should a Person Be? 
'Sheila Heti has broken new ground' Rachel Cusk, on Motherhood 
'Complex, artfully messy and hilarious' Miranda July, on How Should a Person Be? 
'Thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving' Garth Greenwell, on Motherhood 
'Courageous, necessary, visionary' Elif Batuman, on Motherhood

Sheila Heti

Witty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...a classic in the making

Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form

Funny, bawdy and fiercely original

A sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it is like to be a 20-something now

A book that risks everything... Complex, artfully messy, and hilarious

Uniquely honest, funny and clever... Heti is superbly truthful and shockingly funny - no words were minced in the making of this strange, brilliant book

Joyously self-conscious…profoundly ironic…or, perhaps more accurately, it is a production profoundly concerned with how to live authentically in a world saturated by irony

Utterly beguiling: blunt, charming, funny, and smart. Heti subtly weaves together ideas about sex, femininity and artistic ambition. Reading this genre-defying book was pure pleasure

Ambitious, assured and ruthlessly controlled…exhilarating

How Should a Person Be? is a question to be revisited by the author herself, or another writer, or many other writers – but it’s also the question novels were invented to respond to… Sheila makes it ugly to clear a space: for novels to be less fictional, for women to dream of being geniuses, for a way of being 'honest and transparent and give away nothing'

A timely, gloriously messy, openhearted, clever and beautiful new thing

An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide

A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating

A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness

An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds

A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture

[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…How Should a Person Be? offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being

Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know 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 can think of

Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations

'It made me want to write' Sally Rooney 
'A seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for authenticity' Margaret Atwood 
'A classic in the making' Stylist 
 
Sheila's twenties were going to plan. 
 
She got married. 
She hosted parties. 
A theatre asked her to write a play. 
 
Then she realised that she didn't know how to write a play. 
That her favourite part of the party was cleaning up after the party. 
And that her marriage made her feel like she was banging into a brick wall. 
 
So Sheila abandons her marriage and her play, befriends Margaux, a free and untortured painter, and begins sleeping with the dominating Israel, who's a genius at sex but not at art. She throws herself into recording them and everyone around her, investigating how they live, desperate to know, as she wanders, How Should a Person Be? 
 
Using transcripts, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, Heti crafts an exciting, courageous, and mordantly funny tour through one woman's heart and mind. 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

Sheila Heti

Praise for How Should a Person Be?

Witty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...a classic in the making

Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's **one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form**

Amazing

Witty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...a classic in the making

Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's **one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form**

Amazing

Witty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...a classic in the making

Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's **one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form**

Amazing

Books by Sheila Heti

Articles featuring Sheila Heti

A guide to autofiction

Books to read if you’re expecting a baby

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