Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti (/ˈʃiːlə ˈhɛtiː/; born 25 December 1976) is a Canadian writer.^[1][2]

Sheila Heti
Heti in 2013
Born	(1976-12-25) 25 December 1976 (age 48) Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Occupation	Writer
Language	English
Alma mater	University of Toronto National Theatre School of Canada North Toronto Collegiate Institute St. Clement's School
Period	2001–present
Website
sheilaheti.com

Early life

Sheila Heti was born on 25 December 1976 in Toronto.^[3][4] Her parents are Hungarian Jewish immigrants.^[5] Her brother is comedian David Heti.

Sheila Heti attended St. Clement's School in Toronto. She graduated from North Toronto Collegiate Institute in Toronto. She then studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada (leaving the program after one year) and then art history as well as philosophy at the University of Toronto.^[4] Heti said that Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller are early literary influences of hers.^[4]

Career

Writing

Heti's writing spans a variety of genres including plays, short fiction, and novels. She has contributed to periodicals such as Flare, London Review of Books, Brick, Open Letters, Maisonneuve, Bookforum, n+1, the Look, McSweeney's, and the New York Times. Her books have been published internationally, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark.^{[citation needed]}

She formerly worked as the interviews editor at The Believer^[6] where she conducts interviews regularly. She contributed a column on acting to Maisonneuve.^[7] Heti is the creator of Trampoline Hall, a popular monthly lecture series based in Toronto and New York at which people speak on subjects outside their areas of expertise.The New Yorker praised the series for "celebrating eccentricity and do-it-yourself inventiveness". It has sold out every show since its inception in December 2001.^{[citation needed]}

For the early part of 2008, Heti kept a blog called The Metaphysical Poll, where she posted the dreams people had in their sleep about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary season, which readers submitted.

Acting and theater

Heti was an actress as a child and as a teenager appeared in shows directed by Hillar Liitoja, the founder and artistic director of the experimental DNA Theatre.

She appears in Margaux Williamson's 2010 film, Teenager Hamlet and plays Lenore Doolan from Leanne Shapton's book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. In November 2013, Jordan Tannahill directed Heti's play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid at Toronto's Videofag. It was remounted in February 2015 at The Kitchen in New York. Her decade-long struggle to write the play is a primary plot element in her novel How Should a Person Be?^[8]

Books

The Middle Stories

Heti's first book, The Middle Stories, a collection of thirty short stories, was published by House of Anansi in Canada in 2001 when she was twenty-four. It was published by McSweeney's in the United States in 2002. It has been translated into German, French, Spanish, and Dutch.

Ticknor

Heti's novella, Ticknor, was released in 2005. The novel's main characters are based on real people: William Hickling Prescott and George Ticknor, although the facts of their lives are altered. It was published by House of Anansi Press in Canada, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States, and Éditions Phébus in France.

How Should a Person Be?

Heti's How Should a Person Be? was published in September 2010. She describes it as a work of constructed reality, based on recorded interviews with her friends, particularly the painter Margaux Williamson. It was published by Henry Holt in the United States in July 2012 in a slightly different edition (she has spoken in interviews about the edits she made), and the subtitle "A Novel from Life" was added. According to Book Marks, primarily from American publications, the book received a "positive" consensus, based on sixteen critic reviews: five "rave", five "positive", five "mixed", and one "pan".^[9] On The Omnivore, a British aggregator of press reviews, the book received an "omniscore" of 3 out of 5.^[10] The Bookseller reported on reviews from several publications with a rating scale for the novel out of "Top form", "Flawed but worth a read", and "Disappointing": Times and Independent on Sunday reviews under "Top form" and Daily Mail, Sunday Telegraph, and Financial Times reviews under "Disappointing".^[11][12] Culture Critic assessed critical response as an aggregated score of 78% based on British and American press reviews.^[13] It was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012 and by James Wood of The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year. It was also included on year-end lists on Salon, The New Republic, The New York Observer, and more publications.^[14] In her 2007 interview with Dave Hickey for The Believer, she noted, "Increasingly I'm less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just–I can't do it."^[15]

The Chairs Are Where the People Go

In 2011, she published The Chairs are Where the People Go, which she wrote with her friend, Misha Glouberman. The New Yorker called it "a triumph of conversational philosophy" and named it one of the Best Books of 2011.

We Need a Horse

McSweeney's commissioned the children's book from Heti; it was illustrated by Clare Rojas.

Women in Clothes

In Fall 2014, Heti published a non-fiction book about women's relationship to what they wear, with co-editors Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits.^[16] It was a crowd-sourced book, featuring the voices of 639 women from around the world. The book was published by Penguin in the US and the UK, with a German edition published in 2015 by S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main. It was on The New York Times Best Seller list for several months.

Motherhood

In May 2018, Heti published an autobiographical novel, Motherhood, focused on her deliberation on whether or not to have children.^{[17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25]} Initially conceived as a non-fiction work, Heti explores the emphasis society places on motherhood and how women are judged regardless of their decision: "... a woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Nonmothers do, too."^[26] The book was named as a shortlisted finalist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.^[27]

LitHub named her novel, Motherhood, as a Favorite Book of 2018 and a New York Times Critics Pick of 2018.

Pure Colour

Pure Colour, a new novel exploring the human condition, appeared in 2022. It was the winner of the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2022 Governor General's Awards.^[28]

Alphabetical Diaries

Alphabetical Diaries was released in early 2024. Heti had taken a decade's worth of diaries and ordered the sentences alphabetically, before spending another decade or so paring them down into a new book.

Awards

Year	Work	Prize	Result	Ref.
1994	—	YTV Achievement Award Writing	Won	[29]
2001	—	Now Best Emerging Author	Won	[3]
2002	—		Won	[3]
	—	KM Hunter Artists Award	Won	[3]
2003	—	Now Best Emerging Author	Won	[3]
2004	—		Won	[3]
2013	How Should a Person Be?	ReLit Award	Longlisted
		Women's Prize for Fiction	Longlisted
2014	Women in Clothes	Quill and Quire Book of the Year for Nonfiction	Won
2018	Motherhood	Giller Prize	Shortlisted	[30]
2022	Pure Colour	Giller Prize	Longlisted	[31]
		Governor General's Award for English-language fiction	Won	[32]
2023		Folio Prize for Fiction	Shortlisted	[33]

Personal life

Heti lives in Toronto.^[4]

Bibliography

Author

• Heti, Sheila (2001). The Middle Stories. McSweeney's Publishing. ISBN 9781938073090.
• —— (2005). Ticknor: A Novel. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9781429935579.
• ——; Glouberman, Misha (2011). The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 9780865479456.
• —— (2011). We Need a Horse. Illust. by Clare Rojas. McSweeney's Publishing. ISBN 9781936365401.
• —— (2012). How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 9781429943482.
• —— (2015). All Our Happy Days Are Stupid. McSweeney's Publishing. ISBN 9781940450803.
• —— (2018). Motherhood. Henry Holt and Company. ISBN 9781627790772.
• —— (2022). Pure Colour. Knopf Canada. ISBN 9780735282452.^[34]
• —— (2022). A Garden of Creatures. Illus. by Esme Shapiro. Tundra Books, Penguin Random House Canada. ISBN 9780735268821.
• —— (2024). Alphabetical Diaries. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. ISBN 9780374610784.

Short stories

• "The Raspberry Bush"
• "Lilly in the Wintertime"
• "The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates"^[35]
• "Mermaid in a Jar"^[36]
• "What Changed"^[37]
• "Eleanor"^[38]
• "The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea"^[39]

Essays

• "I Didn't Like Sitting With the Rattle for Hours." The Brooklyn Rail. 2017.

Editor

• Sheila Heti; Heidi Julavits; Leanne Shapton, eds. (2014). Women in Clothes. Penguin Publishing Group. ISBN 9780698189829.
• Sheila Heti, ed. (2018). The Best American Nonrequired Reading. Mariner Books. ISBN 9781328465818.

Contributor

• Heti, Sheila (2014). "Playlist: Let's Listen to Love". In Wilson, Carl (ed.). Let's Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 271–277. ISBN 978-1-4411-6677-7.
• Women in Clothes. Blue Rider Press. 2014. ISBN 9780399166563

Interviews

• Heti, Sheila (November–December 2008). "'I'm All in Favor of the Shifty Artist'". The Believer. 6 (9): 40–46. Interview with artist Frank Stella.