Staff Pick
In this fun, thoughtful, and compulsively readable novel, journey with one woman from uncertainty and obsessive rumination to confidence and self-possession. Features a cheeky oracle! Recommended By Jennifer K., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
From the author of How Should a Person Be? ("one of the most talked-about books of the year" — Time Magazine) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children.
In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation.
In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home.
Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how — and for whom — to live.
Review
"This lively, exhilaratingly smart, and deliberately, appropriately frustrating affair asks difficult questions about women’s responsibilities and desires, and society’s expectations." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
Review
"I deeply enjoyed Sheila Heti’s fractal, meticulous, and twinklingly self-aware book — in which every part seemed to know, and be informed by, every other part — about art and time and change and books and babies. Motherhood synergistically functions both as an intimate, moving, autobiographical novel and as a practical, mysterious, five-year tool used by its protagonist to help her contemplate and answer central questions in her life. I think of Motherhood as a beautiful, natural, living thing — a rare tree in the car-filled parking lot of literature, offering aesthetic and sustainable pleasures while also bristling with multiple, helpful, compassionate functions in the world. The high stakes, complexity, intensity, playfulness, seriousness, and inter-dimensionality of Motherhood’s synthesis of art and life, of the imagination and the universe, makes me excited about both life and literature. I recommend reading and rereading Motherhood." Tao Lin, author of Shoplifting from American Apparel and Taipei
Review
"A provocative, creative, and triumphant work of philosophical feminist fiction...Heti writes with courage, curiosity, and uncommon truth." Booklist (Starred Review)
Review
"Reading this beautiful novel, I felt I was watching a brilliant mind invent new tools for thinking. Sheila Heti wrings revelation from the act of asking, again and again, in ever more challenging and innovative ways, impossible questions of existence. Motherhood is a thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving book." Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
About the Author
Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be? which was a New York Times Notable Book and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker. She is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes, and is the former Interviews Editor for The Believer magazine. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Harper's, and n+1.