Artist, Heal Thyself
Looking for answers in Sheila Heti’s creation myth.
twelve years ago, the writer Sheila Heti published a short list of her favorite “secret self-help” books, offering as criteria only that each book had “actually helped me—they’re both precious and practical.” There was Audition (1978), a manual for aspiring actors by the casting director Michael Shurtleff, who claimed to have “discovered” Barbra Streisand singing in a Greenwich Village dive bar. Another was Diane von Furstenberg’s Book of Beauty (1976), a memoir that doubles as a lifestyle guide containing tips on skin care and diet. “Furstenberg’s conviction,” wrote Heti, “that the desire to look great is not a patriarchal illness, but a natural and fine longing, allows me to, guiltlessly, fuss with my hair.” Among her most reassuring suggestions was The Patient Who Cured His Therapist (1992), co-authored by a psychotherapist named Stanley Siegel, who, according to Heti, argued that we feel dysfunctional only when we insist on trying to function in the first place.
Heti wrote that we have been conditioned to find reading for advice déclassé, that “browsing the self-help section of a bookstore seems as shameful as picking up a porn magazine at 7-Eleven.” The same year she made that list, she published her second novel, How Should a Person Be?, and began a long experiment with her own kind of self-help, borrowing the genre’s rhetorical devices in a way that is playful but never mocking. In that novel, a writer named Sheila consults an anthology titled Important Artists to decide where she should live if she too wants to be an important artist. She adopts “Who cares?” as a personal catchphrase, a line cribbed from a self-help book. In Heti’s 2018 novel, Motherhood, a woman grappling with the decision to have children relies on an oracular method inspired by the I Ching to make up her mind:
“I have to ask,” she says, gathering three coins to flip, “am I like those pale, brittle women writers who never leave the house, who don’t have kids, and who always kind of fascinated and horrified me?” Yes, the coins say. “Is there anything I can do to avoid being that way?” she asks. No.
In her research on self-help literature, Harvard scholar Beth Blum cites Heti’s work as part of a new chapter in the genre’s history: She argues that while a number of contemporary essayists and novelists have borrowed the conventions of self-help to critique the “upward mobility ethic,” Heti’s kind of self-help could be read alongside the “parabolic wisdom of the Hebrew Bible” and has the assuaging effects of Jewish humor. Heti is not sheepish about her belief that writers and readers alike turn to books for aid; she has written that “secret self-help” is a phrase that “can describe almost all literature.” What would it mean, then, to evaluate her newest novel, Pure Colour, likewise? Would it be déclassé to say this funny and moving book, about a grieving daughter clinging to beauty to dull or even transcend the pain of loss, is both precious and practical, that it could help you? Maybe so, but—who cares?
While Heti has often drawn on biblical themes in her fiction, Pure Colour has the distinction of opening with a Genesis. The narrator begins by referring to our current state of existence, ravaged by climate change, as just “the first draft of creation.” God is readying for a second stab at this whole thing. He gets out his tool kit and appears—in a departure from the Hebrew Bible—as “three art critics in the sky.” In this creation myth, everyone is a critic classified under three animal rubrics. Critics born of the bird egg are aesthetes, “interested in beauty, order, harmony and meaning.” Then there are the fish critics, who specialize in “structural critique”; for them, “it’s the collective conditions that count.” Last are the bears, who “claim a few people to love and protect” and hold on tight. This typology gives Heti’s creation story the feel of a personality quiz or the zodiac, pulling readers in as they inevitably try to assign themselves an animal. It also establishes the tone of the novel, a parable whose characters are almost purely symbolic, so ethereally represented that it feels weird whenever they sit in a chair or eat solid food.
The plot revolves around Mira, an aspiring art critic born of the bird egg. When we meet her, she has just been accepted to an international satellite school of the “American Academy of American Critics,” a snort-inducing dig at the U.S.-centrism of literary discourse. The novel begins sometime in the pre-internet age. As Heti puts it, “They never saw a video of how another girl fixed her hair.” The school is pretentious and strange; its students “stood on desks, declaiming.” Mira meets and falls in love with another student, an American orphan named Annie. Cue another snort. Annie is a “distant fish,” and, in accordance with the novel’s schematics, she values communal care and collective well-being. (Confusing, given that she is American, unless that is the joke.) Annie finds any sentimentality about family gauchely individualistic and thus offers little in the way of comfort later on when Mira is reeling from the death of her father.
Mira faults herself for being too much of an aesthetically minded bird when her father, a loving and warm bear type, was still alive. Pure Colour is teeming with a kind of guilt that will be familiar to anyone who has lost a parent or been close to someone who has. Yet Mira does not torture herself over memories of phone calls cut short or unpaid visits home. She blames her vocation, cursing herself for leaving to attend not just school but a school for art critics. The novel does not distinguish critics from the artists whose work they write about; both are capable of iciness, of valuing posterity over the needs of those in the here and now. “For art is not made for living bodies—it is made for the cold, eternal soul,” Mira thinks. She wonders at art’s contradiction: that it can establish a connective thread between yourself and millions of strangers across space and time, yet the process of making it requires long periods alone and disconnection from the three or four people in your life you care about the most.
After her father’s death, the book takes on a trancelike quality mirroring the experience of living with grief. She spends weeks “just playing the jewel game on her phone.” Finally, she goes out for some fresh air and visits a park she used to frequent with her dad. A tree catches her eye. She pulls one of its leaves to her face. Then the novel goes in a drastically different direction: Mira gets stuck inside the leaf, literally, and finds her father’s spirit there.
The abruptness of this course correction—the interruption of Mira’s Künstlerroman—feels true to the experience of losing someone and the way it can render all other plots secondary. Nonetheless, this turn, and its duration, will test the patience of readers who expect the breezy conversational realism of How Should a Person Be? (Mira is in that leaf for a while.) Still, I found in the back-andforth between Mira and her late father’s spirit something of the funny, observant email exchanges of that earlier novel. Mira says she would want to return after her death to see if her art had stood the test of time, if it is “exhibited fifty, seventyfive, a hundred years from now.” Her dad replies, “So you want to return to earth to google yourself?” Good point. The surreal leaf detour gives Mira the chance to hear her father’s voice again, a turn of events summed up in a curious line: “She had made him speak!” Who is the “she” here? I do not know that we can assume it is Mira. I think “she” is the author of this first draft of existence. I think “she” is Heti. It is through the leaf, and all that it enables, that Pure Colour responds to Mira’s skepticism of art’s powers: If she once believed that art was a selfish calling, one that pulled her away from familial intimacy, she later finds that art gives the ability to forge that very intimacy anew and, in turn, to move on.
Pure Colour is an almost incoherent novel, a story unfolding in a world at times illuminated only by Christmas lights. Its strangeness may tire readers used to Heti’s more grounded and linear fiction. The reward is that you could actually emerge feeling better. “My basic premise is that in life, you live forever,” the spirit of Mira’s father tells her, “because as soon as you die, you don’t realize you’re dead, so you’re kind of always alive, so the thing is, you shouldn’t worry about yourself.” That is strangely true and weirdly comforting. Heti’s insistence on keeping utility and care at the forefront of her work—her defense of art as therapeutic—is perhaps more radical than it gets credit for. It is okay to come to books feeling vulnerable, directionless, and in need of help, she says. Everyone is already doing that. They’re just doing it in secret.