An Interview with Sheila Heti

SHEILA HETI

© Steph Martyniuk

Sheila Heti’s narrators are not afraid to admit that they do not always have the answers to life’s biggest questions, and the casual strain of philosophical skepticism prominently on display in her work also informs her writing practice: “If you already know what you think,” she asks, “why would you write?” As our conversation unfolds below, Heti answers her own question. She chooses to write because she maintains a firm commitment to the conceptual distinctiveness of “the literary”—and fiction in particular—as the critical-aesthetic format that best allows us to “explore our feelings of uncertainty and doubt.” What her narrators might lack in terms of authoritative knowledge, they make up for by opening new forms of literary-critical inquiry. Without lapsing into moralism—“like staring into the sun, it’s almost too hard to write directly about the strangeness of existing,” Heti says—the ethical current that shoots through her work is grounded in her belief that literature ought to refuse the burden of having to provide answers. Instead, by creating new avenues of inquiry, literature helps us become better thinkers with, and for, each other.

Heti’s breakout work, How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life, was first published in Canada in 2010. When the American version of the novel hit booksellers’ shelves in 2012, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The New Republic, and The San Francisco Chronicle, among others, quickly named it one of the “best books of the year.” When we asked Heti why the back cover categorizes it as “part self-help manual,” she told us that she considers it to be “a self-help manual that doesn’t help. . . . Art has a very confused and confusing relationship to help. Some people say that art isn’t supposed to do anything, but I disagree.” In these moments, the interrogative of the book’s title comes to the fore. What makes How Should a Person Be? a key entry in the catalog of contemporary fiction is that its narrator, Sheila, never makes any grand didactic or even sentimental overtures. Instead, the story begins as a tragedy and ends as a comedy, the title’s interrogative signaling the hesitant triumph of the Eiron-protagonist Sheila. To ask questions and perpetually explore feelings of uncertainty is to expose oneself to the risk of playing the clown, whether one intends to or not, but it is also a form of help. Heti’s fiction provides comfort by reminding us that skepticism and doubt bridge the gap between epistemology and ethics. Somewhat paradoxically, this is how Heti’s work refuses the seriousness that accompanies the label nonfiction.

Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and her equally acclaimed 2018 autobiographical novel, Motherhood, participate in conversations surrounding the literary status of “sincerity” and “authenticity” in contemporary fiction that were reignited in the early 1990s. Recently, a cohort of writers such as David Shields, Ben Lerner, Maggie Nelson, Tao Lin, Percival Everett, Kate Zambreno, and Heti, have offered varying perspectives on what it means for a sincere and authentic self (or not) to write “autofiction” and “autotheory” in the twenty- first century. While How Should a Person Be? calls itself “a novel from life,” and Motherhood is implicitly so, how readers choose to interpret the delicate theoretical balance between the fictional artifice of the novel and its more “realistic” counterpart in the narrator’s (or author’s?) life is left entirely up to them. Like a modern day Emma Bovary, Heti considers both paths—fiction and life—to be constitutive of art because, as she puts it in our interview, “writers have always used their lives as the source for their novels, perhaps just less overtly than in our cases [today]. What we’re doing is not radically different from what writers have always done.” The conversations that follow demonstrate a shared concern about the contemporary current in literary criticism to appraise fiction based on its relation to a purported external “real...