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Sheila Heti: ‘Books by women still get treated differently from those by men’
After her controversial novel about motherhood, the Canadian author has turned the spotlight on her father. She talks about grief, honesty – and her decision not to have children
Sheila Heti hadn’t intended to write a book about grief, but in late 2018, about a year after she’d started writing her new novel, Pure Colour, her father died. “He had been sick, but it was always going to be a shock. It has been the most profound change I’ve experienced in adulthood, having a parent die. Mother and father are connected to what life is, and you know all along they aren’t the sky, the earth – they’re people. But while your mind knows it, maybe your body doesn’t,” she says. As a result of the shock, she adds, the story in her book “suddenly breaks”.
Heti and I are sitting in her cosy second-floor apartment in Toronto, which she shares with her boyfriend of 11 years, Luc, and their friendly rottweiler, Feldman. Outside, a blizzard blows, but Feldman keeps us both warm by snoozing on our feet. A mutual friend had told me beforehand that the 45-year-old Heti “will seem young to you”, and, with her girlish voice and 1990s teenager outfit of a long-sleeved T-shirt beneath a cotton blue dress, she does at first. But she seems older than I expected, too. Her short, pixie-like fringe, which she had when she wrote her previous bestselling novels, 2010’s How Should a Person Be? and 2018’s Motherhood, has gone (“I just grew out of it”), and she has a quietness and perceptiveness that is often overlooked by critics, who mistake her originality for kookiness. It is easy to imagine her, simultaneously, as the precociously artsy girl she once was and the pin‑sharp older woman she will one day be.
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