Available:*
Library | Shelf Number | Material Type | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Searching... Hattiesburg Library | FICTION HETI | Book | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
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.
Author Notes
Sheila Heti was born in Toronto, Canada in 1976. She studied playwriting at the National Theatre School and philosophy at the University of Toronto.
Heti runs Trampoline Hall, a monthly lecture series, and writes regularly about the visual arts. Her title The Middle Stories was Shortlisted for the 2001 Upper Canada Writer's Craft Award. Heti was voted Best Emerging Writer in NOW magazine's Reader's Poll in 2001. In September 2010, Heti's book How Should a Person Be?, was published by Henry Holt in the United States in July 2012. It was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012 and by The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The subject of the new novel from Heti (How Should a Person Be?) is neither birth nor child-rearing, but the question of whether to want a child, which the unnamed narrator calls "the greatest secret I keep from myself." To find the answer, she practices techniques cribbed from the I Ching, consults a psychic and Tarot cards, contemplates her mother's experiences as a woman, counts her periods, and considers freezing her eggs. In the meantime, she and her partner, Miles, are going through a rough patch, only partly due to her indecision, which is exacerbated by visits with her friends (all of whom seem to have newborn babies), recurrent and bittersweet fantasies of raising a family, and her knowledge that she is reaching the end of the window when maternity is possible. A book of sex (the real, unsensational kind), mood swings, and deep feminist thought, this volume is essentially a chronicle of vacillating ruminations on this big question. Although readers shouldn't go in expecting clean-cut epiphanies, this lively, exhilaratingly smart, and deliberately, appropriately frustrating affair asks difficult questions about women's responsibilities and desires, and society's expectations. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Heti's (How Should a Person Be?, 2010) novel of a woman pondering what's perhaps life's most essential and most endlessly debatable decision is a provocative, creative, and triumphant work of philosophical feminist fiction. The narrator, in her late thirties, begins writing a new book while in thrall to the question of whether to have a child. As she works, she consults a method inspired by an ancient Chinese divination system, the I Ching, asking questions about these two paths of potential creation and flipping three coins for a yes or no answer to them. (Her first two: Is this book a good idea? yes; Is the time to start it now? yes.) In more narrative sections, the writer explores her relationship with her boyfriend, who's unconflicted in his lack of a desire for a child with her, and with her mother, an accomplished doctor whose mothering angst the narrator recalls acutely and whose sorrow she believes she inherited. As her character seeks and ultimately chooses, as she must, the aspects of life and art she'll lay claim to, Heti writes with courage, curiosity, and uncommon truth: To go along with what nature demands and to resist it both are really beautiful impressive and difficult in their own ways. --Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2018 Booklist