The Child Thing: An Interview with Sheila Heti

I met Sheila Heti at her home in the west end of Toronto on January 31, 2018, three months before the publication of her novel Motherhood. Heti opened her front door with one hand while the other gripped the leather collar of her dog, a Rottweiler named Feldman with a handsome boulder-size head. They led me up the stairs to a rambling second-floor apartment. Heti washed fresh fruit and made black tea before we retreated to her writing studio. We sat facing each other on a velvet couch, Heti’s desk and a hard chair in the opposite corner. She explained that her boyfriend had just rearranged the seating area and with the positioning of the armchairs, coffee table, and bookshelf, it was now much better. Feldman moved between the furniture, negotiating a space for his massive, shining body. He curled himself between us and panted heavily. When I listened back to the tape of our conversation, his breaths sounded as if something were being inflated. Heti explained that she and her boyfriend gave him the name Feldman so he wouldn’t seem so scary to others. Feldman eventually relocated to the floor. As we spoke, Sheila occasionally dropped fruit into his mouth.

Sheila Heti was born in Toronto on Christmas Day in 1976 to Jewish Hungarian parents. After high school, she went on to study playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal (she dropped out after one year), then art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto. She began publishing in her early twenties with the short story collection The Middle Stories (2001) and went on to produce work in nearly every form: collaborations in The Chairs Are Where the People Go (2011) and Women in Clothes (2014); a play, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid (2015); a book for children, We Need a Horse (2011); and the novels Ticknor (2005), How Should a Person Be? (2010), and now, Motherhood. Alongside her writing, Heti cofounded the lecture series Trampoline Hall and served as the interviews editor at The Believer. In Motherhood, Heti takes