An Interview with Sheila Heti

Edited by Talia Blatt

Sheila Heti is a Canadian novelist, playwright, and essayist. The Fiction Board of The Harvard Advocate met with her over Zoom the morning of December 15, 2022. We spoke about her novels and children’s books, theater, mushrooms, reading her diaries in The New York Times, artificial intelligence, and how maybe everything is just fiction.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Advocate: I want to ask you the role of visual images in your writing, because your books tend not to have a lot of visual description. But in Motherhood, you choose to use photos, and clearly color is important in Pure Colour. How do you think about visual images while you're writing?

Sheila Heti: I've never had that question before. It's a good question. I think I don't see the scenes that I write maybe as vividly as I imagine other writers see their worlds. For example, in Pure Colour, I don't really have a picture of Mira. Is she short? What does her face look like? Houses I've been in, or streets I've been on, can come into my head when I'm writing, but I never feel the need to describe them. I guess I have this conviction that the less you say, the easier it is for another person to imagine something really specific and vivid. I'm reading The Sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch, and I love it. And she does describe a house that this man is living in, and my brain just can't imagine that house, because I've never seen a house like that. So I just fill it in with my own invented house. Maybe not being very visual comes from studying as a playwright and reading so many plays when I was younger. I think when I’m writing, I actually imagine scenes happening on a stage, a little bit more than I imagine them happening in real life. A stage only has the necessary objects, the minimum of what is needed for the scene to take place.

I'd love to hear you talk more about how your background in theatre influences your artistry as a novelist.

What I like about theatre is that it's alive; the show changes every night. And I like collaboration; the process of making theatre is so fun. I was part of an experimental theatre group in my teens called DNA Theatre, and I worked with a great director named Hillar Liitoja. There were no scripts—there were “scores”—and the texts were often derived from poetry, like Ezra Pound, or the writings of Artaud. It was the first experience I had of making art with professional artists. Since then, I have often wanted to reproduce for myself that feeling of collaboration, of a family being formed around a project, and of something surprising happening in the moment—for the maker, and for the audience. All those elements of the theatre I miss, I feel like I've found a way to keep them, even as just a writer of novels. Very specifically, I'm interested in dialogue. I love dialogue. And I think there's something about all the white space you find in printed plays that I prefer over big, dense blocks of text. It’s where I'm drawn aesthetically.

Continuing with your background in theatre, I was wondering about the role of chance in your fiction. The coins in Motherhood come to mind. We think of fiction as such an engineered, hyper-detailed space, but it seems like something else for you.

I think chance and collaboration are similar words for me. Flipping coins is a way of collaborating—of not being the only person in the room. I agree with you: the traditional image of the novelist is of the god, the architect. And I am that, but I also enjoy being really deliberately in relation to forces that throw me off. I just want to be surprised, so something like throwing coins is a direct and effective way of bringing surprise into my process. I’m also a person who doesn't like following my own rules. My friend Margaux Williamson started doing yoga at the beginning of the pandemic, and she's been doing it every day since—while I have never been able to follow a rule for myself for more than a week or two. I make rules and then forget that I made them, or I rebel against them. If I was to write a novel in a more traditional way—following a plot I had determined in advance, say—I would very soon rebel against myself. Whereas if I have something that's not me to respond to, that short-circuits this rebellion impulse or this boredom I feel about my own rules. Change or collaboration brings me into the present. If you're somebody who's good at following your own rules, you’re able to remain happily in relation to something that you chose to do a year ago, or a month ago, but I can't live that way. So I can't write that way. I just can't do that in any area of my life. But I'm really interested in conversation. So if, while writing, I feel I’m having a conversation with a surprising “other” every day, that keeps me interested.

Something that really stuck out to me in your answer was when you mentioned Margaux from How Should a Person Be?, and how she's doing yoga now. And for a second, I was unsure whether you were talking about the person or the character in the book, or both. We’ve had some fun asking authors about autofiction this year. I'm curious about the bidirectional relationship between your fiction and your relationships — how writing Margaux the character affected how you interact with real Margaux, and vice versa.

With Margaux, it was a very deliberate experiment that both of us were undergoing. Some people write about people in their lives and don’t tell them. But for us, it was mutual: Margaux also made a movie, Teenager Hamlet, in which I acted as a version of myself. Sholem Krishtalka was painting people in our friend group. We were all working in this way in 2005 or 2006. It seems incredibly long ago now. I think our relationship was more affected after the book was published, and we became these characters in the world. She's an incredible artist in her own right, and I think it was hard for her identity to be so publicly wrapped up with my art. That was not pleasant. She didn't want to talk about the book with the press or anything.

We stopped being friends around 2017. We had a falling out, and didn't talk for a year and a half. I thought our friendship was completely over. The book wasn’t the reason, but our falling out was helpful in that it allowed our friendship to reset, and we were finally able to leave what was painful about that whole experience behind. We’re close again now.

Still, living those years together was the most incredible adventure I’ve ever had. Artistically, neither of us had ever experienced something like those years of talking and writing and working and traveling and sharing. It was pure magic and joy. We were trying to make ourselves into the artists we are now. We still talk all the time about how terrifying it is to think of never having met because, I don't think we would be as free. It was hard and painful, too. Sometimes she didn't like what I'd written about her. We had little fights, but it felt very alive and very mutual.

I was reading How Should a Person Be? And a lot of reviews described it as a “fictionalized account.” I was wondering what that label of fiction means to you, as somebody who writes so often about what is live and what is real.

I call that book fiction. I like that word. If you call something fiction, then the reader doesn’t know what the rules are. That's important to me, that the audience doesn't know. Some people have called my books nonfiction or memoir, but I insist on calling them fiction. So many scenes—in Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?—didn’t happen at all. And the motivations of writing fiction and writing memoir are quite different. People write memoirs to tell the world about themselves. I never felt like that was my motivation. I don't feel like the Sheila in How Should a Person Be? is me. It was like I was an actress and that was the part that I was playing at the time I was writing the book. It felt very clear to me that Margaux and I were on some level acting, in life, and that those years that I was writing the book, I was on stage, in a sense. If I hadn't written the book, I would never have played that part. When people call it fiction, I’m happy.

We all read your alphabetized diary in The New York Times, which I thought was so cool. My first question – did you manually type all your diaries into Excel? Because that seems like it would have been really tedious, and that's all I could think about. And then second, to what extent does this actually feel like your diary versus a work of fiction you created? And what’s it like to have your most personal thoughts out there published in The New York Times?

I'm actually publishing it as a book in February 2024. All I've been doing lately is working on it, so these questions are right at the tip of my mind. To answer your first question: No, I wrote my diaries on the computer. I don't really write anything by hand.

I've been working on this project forever—thirteen years now. At present, the book is 60,000 words. And the diaries originally were about 500,000 words. So there are a lot of decisions being made in cutting that much. I think the most important thing that fictionalized it for me—even though I think we're going to call it nonfiction—was changing the names. There were no names for a long time. Then reading over the sentences in the diaries—with only “he” or “she” and no names—I began to see archetypes. There was a certain kind of man I would get involved with, in a certain kind of way, and I would have a certain kind of time with him. Or there would be this older female who gave advice. I think this must be true of everyone’s life: we are drawn to certain types of people, or perceive the people in our life as certain types. So I began to make new, composite characters in the book, which was fun. I also wanted to do that because I don't think it’s right to write so directly about people who've never given their consent.

With the Times series, I'd never been so nervous in the lead up to the publication of anything. Like, I felt like I was gonna die. I just had this terrible, terrible feeling inside. The way they laid it out, it’s clear it’s a work of art. But I didn’t know they were going to format it like that until I saw it online, along with everyone else. I thought it was going to look like an opinion column, with a comment section. I thought people would be like, ‘Why the hell is this in the newspaper?’ Of course it seems completely trivial compared to the events of the world.

I made a really stupid decision. The day it came out, I felt like the way to relax was to do a lot of mushrooms. I had the worst trip I've ever had in my life. It was really not the wisest way to distract myself from the experience of having everyone read my diaries.

At this point, I don't care about publishing it as a book. I mean, I’m not worried. I've been through every feeling about it, and it doesn't really feel like me at this point. It doesn't feel like I'm revealing anything. And to the extent that I am, I'm happy to, because I think we're all the same anyway. So it’s sort of my job.

What you’re saying reminds me of a line somewhat early in How a Person Should Be, about how there are some people who are destined to be naked and show us what it means to be human. That sounds like how you're describing this project.

Totally, absolutely. It's funny, you keep calling it ‘how a person should be.’ Margaux, for years when I was writing the book, also did that, and it drove me crazy. Many people do that, and it’s funny to me because they're such different titles, right? One is an answer, and one is a question.

I have a question about the role jealousy plays in your writing. Often when you read about jealousy, it's tearing characters apart, it's catastrophic for their relationship. But in your writing, it actually seems to have the opposite effect, bringing characters closer together. So I’m wondering how you see jealousy as a tool in fiction, and how it’s related to the mimetic act of reading, the idea of reading somebody's life so closely.

I think jealousy has value in that it makes you pay really close attention—think of all those people who follow somebody on Instagram with obsessive interest, hating them and being jealous of them at the same time. But of course, it's a distorted attention which doesn't actually see the whole person—their humanity and their suffering. When I wrote Ticknor, I was thinking, ‘I'm going to write this book, and I'm going to solve my envy and jealousy by putting it down on the page and getting it out of my system.’ It didn’t work: I still can be very jealous of other people, usually writers. When you're jealous of someone, you don't think they are genuinely frail in a similar way to yourself. It's giving them so much power—the power of having created their life, in a way that nobody really creates their life. The illusion is that they've actually been able to mould something out of the mush of living, while you've just been stumbling through. For me, or maybe for many people, that's the thing that feels enviable: self-creation. Jealousy as a form of attention can bring you closer, but it also blinds you to the most important things about someone.

I'm curious about the role of big questions in your books. The second half of Pure Colour is interested in the way that Mira can't communicate what feels like a profound truth to her. What is the role of the novelist in searching for and communicating these big truths and big questions?

For me, in my novels so far, if there is something I really want to reflect about human life, it’s that we are actually unable to answer our biggest questions. The novel is probably the best art form for a person who's interested in questions, because there’s no other art form where you can be inside the mind in the same precise way. Ultimately that’s why I didn't end up being a playwright, because I think plays are really about interpersonal drama, and novels are about inner drama — for me, the drama of not knowing why we exist or why we’re here spurs the most interesting kinds of conflicts.

I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the line between fiction and nonfiction or reality for you. I’m thinking of a line in How Should a Person Be?: “Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others?”

There’s no line. It’s all fiction. Really, where is the nonfiction? Maybe this couch is nonfiction. But once the couch is in my mind, it's fiction. The fact that we have separate consciousnesses from one another is probably fiction. The fact that we die and our consciousness disappears, that’s maybe fiction, too. We just don't know anything—it's all stories that we've collectively decided to tell and agree upon. Marriage is a fiction. Commitment to another person is a fiction. I don't see a line between fiction and nonfiction. I just don't think nonfiction really exists. Even material, tangible things are a kind of fiction: we don’t see the space between the atoms which make up the couch. We don’t know what the world is to itself, which makes it all a fiction.

Something that I think is speaking to the blurriness of fiction and consciousness these days is AI. The board spoke earlier about your “Hello, World!” series with a conversational bot that was published in The Paris Review. I'm curious to hear how you wrote that series, and whether you've been playing with ChatGPT.

It's funny—when I was answering the last question, I was also thinking about chatbots. Alice, the chatbot in that Paris Review series, has had around 9000 conversations with strangers since I posted the series. The first question she asks people is, “What do you think reality is?” If people don’t immediately start sexually harassing her, they’ll generally say that reality is a simulation. The more and more we’re online, the more the unreality of everything becomes heightened. I haven't played around with ChatGPT. What I like about Alice is the lie—the frame that “this is a person.” ChatGPT seems more like Alexa or Siri: it’s a characterless program. I’m more interested in the illusion of a relationship between you and another consciousness, as is the case with Alice. But also, I spent all summer playing around with Alice, so I’m not in a place anymore where I’m feeling so curious to talk to a robot. I've gone all the way into my obsession and come out. Also, if everyone's doing something—like exploring ChatGPT—I don't feel I need to. You don’t look for treasure where everyone else is looking.

I'm interested in the way that sexual imagery figures in your books. I feel like you often bring sex up in these funny and surprising ways. Like in Pure Colour, you describe Mira’s feelings for Annie in terms of vaginal sex, and it's shocking in the context of what we've been reading up to that point, especially since your books have such a theological turn to them as well. Could you talk about the role sex plays in your writing?

It's such a fundamental part of what a human is—we’re creatures who come out of two people having sex. I don't think that much about sex; it's just a condition of our existence. When I use sexual metaphors, I don't feel titillated. It feels like talking about sun and rain and food. So it makes sense to me to use those images, maybe in seemingly unlikely places. I don't think of sex as necessarily being sexy.

But looking at the chatbot data, it’s amazing. 85 or 90% of it is people trying to have sex with Alice. At first, I was horrified and turned off—why are people so basic? But that is our most fundamental drive. It makes sense that people want to have sex with her. But it makes me feel like we're not even individuals, we’re just these biological creatures. We have all these illusions about being civilized and being in culture, and really it's all just such a thin sheen on top of some very basic drives. I don't understand people who keep sex out of their books. Why? It's a kind of prudery.

You've written two children's books, one fairly recently. How do you decide what is content for children, and how do you think about your young readers compared to the audience of your novels?

My first children’s book, We Need a Horse, was a commission. McSweeney's said, ‘We're starting a children's book series, can you write one?’ And that was really, really hard to do. Because—exactly as you say—what does it mean to write for a five-year-old? You have to make your mind into the mind of a child again. I wrote so many stories and all of them felt condescending or silly. Then one night something clicked, and I was back inside that child mind I once had, and the story came out of that momentary experience of my mind changing shape. With my most recent book, A Garden of Creatures, I just spontaneously wrote the story on my phone, and then I wondered if it could be a children's book. Something about it made me have that question. I sent it to a friend of mine. Well, she wasn't even a friend at the time, just somebody I vaguely knew, the illustrator and children’s book author Esme Shapiro. She loved it. It was really her judgment that turned it into a children's book. I tried to read it to my three-year-old niece soon after it was published. She wasn't interested.

Many of the great children's book writers—and I don't count myself among those, I mean people like Roald Dahl or Maurice Sendak—don't themselves have children. Sendak himself pointed out in an interview we ran in The Believer: if you have children, you become, in relation to children, a parent, and children don’t want to read books written by their parents. They want to read books by somebody who's like them. You remain more like a child if you don't have children. It’s like you’re on the same team. Roald Dahl in particular—he's not on the side of the parents, who are always these monstrous figures. Sometimes you read children's books which you can tell are written by parents—they want to teach and lead and make the kids good. I don't think that’s any fun for kids to read.

It's interesting you say that. We interviewed the novelist and poet Ben Lerner earlier this year, and he talked extensively about how fatherhood has affected his writing—that he thinks of his kids as potential future readers, which incentivizes him both to be responsible and protect his readers, but then also to be incredibly irresponsible in reaction to that pressure.

That's so interesting. I have a friend—a poet and writer—who just wrote a book that she's planning to publish a year from now, and it’s about her divorce. She has a ten-year-old child, and the book is about the horribleness of the man she divorced. People keep telling her, ‘You can't publish this because your child is going to one day read it.’ And she has these pangs of guilt and doubt about whether she should. I think being a parent does change your sense of what you permit yourself to write and publish. I wouldn’t want those questions in my mind.

It's time for a speed round. What’s something you’ve always been bad at, no matter how hard you try?

There are so many ways of answering this question. Okay, anytime I make money, I spend it. I'm very bad at denying myself pleasure. An inability to deny yourself pleasure sort of negatively affects every area of your life, in the long run.

What was the last gift you gave or received?

I spent the fall at Yale and there's a Pez museum in a small town near New Haven. I went to the Pez Museum and I bought a “Peppa Pig” Pez for my four-year-old niece. Actually, I haven't given her that one yet. I gave her the other one I bought for her there, a fuzzy “Hello Kitty” Pez.

Who reads your writing first?

Besides me, probably Margaux.

What's the last movie you saw in theaters?

Triangle of Sadness.

How much sleep did you get last night?

I was editing the diaries. I went to bed around 2:30 in the morning and then I woke up for this interview at 9:30. My boyfriend came to bed in between those two times, so I probably woke up then, too.

What books were important to you when you were in college or college-aged?

Martin Buber’s I and Thou. Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles. My Friends by Emmanuel Bove. Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety.

Do you have any special talents?

Yeah, I'm an incredible matchmaker. I've made like seven marriages. I just have the instinct. I love it. Any show about matchmaking, like Indian Matchmaking, I love all that stuff. It's like paint colors—people’s essences, their personalities and dreams. Matchmaking feels like painting, to me: this color goes with that color.

Have you ever tried to make a match, and it went horribly awry?

No. I recently made a match for a close female friend and it didn't work because I was thinking about the man as he was when I knew him, 15 years ago, before his child died and his marriage broke up. Those things change you. They met up and she reported that he was actually a completely different person than the person I had known so intimately. So that didn't go horribly, but it was unsatisfying for both of them. Then I set her up with this woman and they're still seeing each other.

A last question—we're all here because we're young people who care a lot about novels and reading. Any parting words of advice or wisdom for us as readers?

Everyone reads in their own way. It’s such a personal, intimate, private activity. No, I don't think one needs advice. Reading is a real genuine love, and people don't need advice for love.