Novel about the pros and cons of having children reads like an act of resistance

At a book festival, the childless narrator of Sheila Heti’s new novel encounters a fellow female childless writer, who says to her, confidingly: “With women our age, the first thing one always wants to know about another woman is whether she has children. And, if she doesn’t, whether she is going to. It’s like a civil war: which side are you on?”

The fact that women are still pervasively defined by whether they have chosen to have a child or not is railed against with occasional brilliance in Motherhood.

The narrator, whom we are invited to assume is Heti (inset) herself, is a successful Canadian writer in her late thirties, tormented not only by the question of whether she wants to have a child (she mainly thinks she doesn’t), but by the general assumption from friends, strangers and society at large that she eventually will.

The writing of this novel — which, in its intimate jumble of observations and feelings across several years, mostly resembles a memoir — is not only a chance for her to work through how she feels, but also an act of resistance.

Near the end, Heti confesses that the book has become a “prophylactic”.

The work of producing it has been a thing to do while she waits for her child-bearing years to pass, a “raft that will carry me just so long and so far, that my questions can no longer be asked”.

Heti, whose 2013 novel How Should a Person Be? was a critical hit, draws heavily here on the techniques of auto-fiction, in which the borders between fiction and autobiography are deliberately blurred.

The narrator conceives of herself as a writer, above and beyond being a woman, which is a fundamental reason of hers for not wanting a child, but she isn’t at all interested in the obvious truth that you can be a writer and a mother and succeed at both.

She becomes more stimulating when she strays beyond herself to her Jewish heritage and the dark shadow of the Holocaust.

The Jewish impulse, she writes, is to repopulate — otherwise “the Nazis will have won”. Yet in an astonishing, all-toobrief repudiation of this idea, she writes that she doesn’t care “if the human race dies out”.

But she finishes writing the book in a spirit of victory and, not only out of relief that we, too, have come to the end, we can’t help cheering with her.