To procreate or not? Toronto writer tackles the debate
“I see friends of mine who have kids and continue to do their art. It’s deeply impressive,” Sheila Heti says. “I can’t even fit an Amazon return into the day. It’s been sitting on my desk for two weeks.”
Although Heti laughs good-heartedly about her inability to make time to get to the post office, the daily obligations that come with raising children have been on the Toronto author’s mind for the past eight years. They hover around the emotional core of her new book, Motherhood, an autofictional novel that follows an author’s internal debate as she decides whether she wants to get pregnant.
Divorced in her late 30s, living with a man who has a daughter, the narrator turns to those around her in hopes of making the right decision — with a little help from the I Ching and tarot cards.
Motherhood is a refreshingly contemporary examination of an ageless subject. While generations of male artists received a free pass as absent fathers, childless women have been deemed selfish for focusing on their craft.
Others have made the personal decision to step away or delay their careers, such as Patti Smith, who left the music industry for 16 years to raise her family. Alice Munro didn’t publish her first story collection until she was 37 — the same age as Heti’s narrator. Yet while societal expectations have evolved, motherhood is still deified (hello, Beyoncé and Kate Middleton) and the emotional journey for many women remains.
“It’s not as dramatic as it once was,” Heti says of the decision to not have children. “You’re not a social pariah by any stretch. For my generation, it’s a legitimate life choice, which makes the pressure or the choice much more personal than trying to fit in with society.”
Heti’s last novel, 2012’s How Should a Person Be, which focused on a woman’s artistic doubts, was born out of Heti’s creative struggles while working on a play. Motherhood’s narrator is at another point in her life. Confident in her writing career, she is fairly certain she does not want to get pregnant, but still agonizes over the decision.
“There is that feeling that you’re locking yourself into a life around that age,” says Heti. “Every choice you make has higher stakes, or that’s how it feels. I’m 41 now and in 20 years I might say that’s an illusion.”
Heti originally proposed Motherhoodas a non-fiction investigation through interviews with other women. “I wanted to talk to a lot of women about their experiences along the path to motherhood, or along the path to not being a mother,” she says.
“For my generation, it’s a legitimate life choice, which makes the pressure ... much more personal.” SHEILA HETI AUTHOR, MOTHERHOOD
“I was going to talk to a lot of women about the experience of being a mother and just try to think through the problem that way.” But another opportunity popped up, one that would allow her to delve into another foundational aspect of the female experience. In 2014, Heti — along with Heidi Julavits, author and co-author of the Believer magazine, and authorartist Leanne Shapton (who designed the cover art for Motherhood) — published Women in Clothes, a themed compilation of more than 600 interviews that survey how our garment choices define more than personal style. By the time Heti was finished the ambitious twoyear project, she was itching to return to her own writing. “When I came back to Motherhood, I didn’t want to do that again. It became my own writing and more novelistic in structure,” she says. “I really enjoyed the process of Women in Clothes, but there’s no way I would have done that again. It felt more like being an editor than a writer and I longed to write again.”
Although Motherhood is officially no longer a work of nonfiction, it is still very much a book of conversations. “I wanted to write it in an open way that would lead to more discussion. I think there’s so much to say and not just from my perspective,” Heti says.
“I do hope people feel like they are impelled by reading it to respond. A lot of women experience working through this and it’s not going to be what I’ve portrayed.”