Who will she be if she has a child? Who will she be if she doesn’t? What kind of a woman? What kind of a writer? Motherhood is that book, a thoughtful, claustrophobic novel dominated by its narrator’s increasingly anxious and miserable back-and-forth. But what could be worse than to fail to recognise the desire for a baby until it’s too late, and to spend the rest of one’s life in regret? Watching her agonise, Miles suggests that she write a book about motherhood. But when she visits them, she feels alienated and bored. But she’s a writer, committed to a life of art and freedom how can she allow a child to interrupt that life? (Miles warns her darkly that one can be a great parent or a great artist, but not both.) And yet, might her writing not suffer if she turns away from what increasingly seems to her ‘the central experience of life’? Everywhere she turns, her female friends are having babies. On the other, she does sometimes dream that she has a child, and sometimes when she wakes from these dreams she feels happy.
But how can she tell? On the one hand, she has never dreamed of being a mother.
He has a child from a previous relationship and no desire for another, but he’ll have a baby with the narrator if it’s what she really wants. She lives in Toronto with her partner, Miles. The narrator of Motherhood is in her mid-thirties. Should she have a child? And while a woman can keep wondering how she should be for the whole of her life, whether to reproduce is a decision that can’t wait forever. This question is a problem for the opposite reason: it has only two possible answers, and they’re mutually exclusive. The unnamed narrator of Motherhood, who shares various biographical details with the narrator of How Should a Person Be?, and with Heti herself, is also preoccupied with a question. The problem with this question, as she discovers, is that it’s infinitely open-ended no two people give the same answer, or behave in the same way. ‘For years and years I asked it of everyone I met,’ the narrator says. Sheila Heti’s last novel, How Should a Person Be?, opens with the question of its title.
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