Motherhood - Hardcover

Heti, Sheila

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1846558379 ISBN 13: 9781846558375

Publisher: Harvill Secker

Synopsis

A provocative novel about the desire and duty to procreate, from the author of the critically acclaimed How Should A Person Be? Motherhood treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood - whether or not to have children - with the intelligence, wit and originality that have won Sheila Heti international acclaim. Having reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti's narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance, she struggles to make a moral and meaningful choice. In a compellingly direct mode that straddles the forms of the novel and the essay, Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how - and for whom - to live.

About this title

About the Author:

Sheila Heti is the author of seven books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? and is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller, Women in Clothes. She is the former interviews editor at The Believer magazine, and has been published in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, McSweeney's, Harper's and n+1. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. She lives in Toronto.

Review:

"Earthy and philosophical and essential . . . Motherhood floats, as did Heti's excellent novel How Should a Person Be?, somewhere between fiction and nonfiction. It reads like an inspired monologue . . . Heti's semi-fiction, like that of writers like Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk and Teju Cole, among others, is dismantling our notions of what a novel should be . . . She deals out her ideas in no-nonsense form, as if she were pulling espresso shots . . . This book is endlessly quotable, and a perfect review would be nothing but quotations. She makes a banquet of her objections to parenthood. If you are an underliner, as I am, your pen may go dry . . . Indeed, Heti always seems to be drawing from a paranormally deep well . . . Funny . . . Cannily employed." -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times * "Probing, psychologically unafraid, witty... With its mix of autofiction and philosophy, Motherhood is no manifesto but an essential - and often exasperating - exploration of uncertainty and of the art that can be created from it." -- Catherine Taylor * Financial Times * "Motherhood is a poetic, innovative book. It is groundbreaking in its fluidity, in its recognition of the unrecognizability of desire, and in its scrutiny of expectation... she introduces a critical, exhilarating freedom." -- Rebecca Watson * Spectator * "[Motherhood] embed[s] deeply philosophical questions into casual and familiar language... It is about the paralysis a person might feel when given the freedom to create, whether babies, books or oneself." -- Jo Lo Dico * Evening Standard * "Motherhood is a fiercely intelligent and probing read that delves deep into the fundamentals of procreating, motherhood and what it means to be a woman in today's world... not only an important novel about a fundamental question that women ask of themselves but a pass to live more in their minds, in their imaginations, in those fertile spaces from which great works grow." -- Sarah Gilmartin * Irish Times * "Motherhood is self-examination elevated to an art form... beautifully written and profound." -- Lucy McLuckie * The Scotsman * "In Motherhood, Heti takes on her most controversial and private debate yet - whether or not to have a child. A brilliant, radical, and moving book, it is sure to cause the cultural riot her earlier work has . . . There's a new quality to Heti's writing in Motherhood. The only way I can describe it is tenderness . . . Beautiful . . . Surprising." -- Claudia Dey * The Paris Review * "Illuminating . . . Intimate . . . Poignant." -- Alexandra Schwartz * The New Yorker * "Engrossing . . . Motherhood joins How Should a Person Be? and Women in Clothes to form what might be read as a field guide to womanhood in a particular literary-bohemian milieu . . . Motherhood, in this book, exists most of all as a force that shapes women's lives and their relationships with one another. Heti approaches the subject with an observer's curiosity more than a deliberate agenda . . . Motherhood foils my abilities as a critic: I like the book as a catalyst for thought, and admire its ability to withstand sustained consideration." -- Molly Fischer * New York Magazine * "This inquiry into the modern woman's moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response - finally - to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I've read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself." -- Rachel Cusk "I've never seen anyone write about the relationship between childlessness, writing, and mother's sadnesses the way Sheila Heti does. I know Motherhood is going to mean a lot to many different people - fully as much so as if it was a human that Sheila gave birth to - though in a different and in fact incommensurate way. That's just one of many paradoxes that are not shied away from in this courageous, necessary, visionary book." -- Elif Batuman "An emotionally complex novel about motherhood that isn't about children. An intricately constructed book based on games of chance. This feels new." -- Jenny Offill

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvill Secker
• ISBN 10: 1846558379
• ISBN 13: 9781846558375
• Binding: Hardcover