A short life of the author
Sheila Heti (born 1976) is a Canadian writer whose books occupy a space between fiction, philosophy, and autobiography that has no established name — though “autofiction” is the term most commonly applied. Her novels are not exactly novels: they use the real material of her life (conversations, relationships, decisions) as the substance of philosophical investigations into how to live, whether to have children, what art is for, and how to be a person in the world. She is one of the writers who most fully defined the literary sensibility of the 2010s.
Life and Career
Heti was born in Toronto and studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada and art history at the University of Toronto. She founded and edited the interview journal Trampoline Hall — a series of lectures by non-experts on randomly assigned topics — which captured something essential about the early-2000s Toronto arts scene.
Her first novel, The Middle Stories (2001), was a collection of fairy-tale-like fictions. Ticknor (2005) was a brief historical novel. Neither prepared readers for How Should a Person Be? A Novel from Life (2010 in Canada, 2012 in the US), which drew on real conversations with her friend Margaux Williamson (a painter), transcripts of phone calls, and accounts of her own sexual experiences, artistic anxieties, and creative paralysis. The book was controversial: praised by some as a radical reinvention of the novel and dismissed by others as solipsistic or exhibitionist. It became a literary event that defined arguments about authenticity, sincerity, and the novel form for the rest of the decade.
Motherhood (2018) is structured around a single question: should Heti have a child? She consults the I Ching, argues with her partner, examines her own ambivalence, and arrives at — well, an answer, but one that feels more like a philosophical position than a narrative resolution. The book is the rare novel about not having children that treats the decision with genuine intellectual seriousness rather than either defending or lamenting it.
Pure Colour (2022) is her most ambitious and strangest book: a creation myth about a woman whose father dies and who enters a leaf to commune with his spirit. Alphabetical Diaries (2024) arranges every sentence from her decade of diary-keeping in alphabetical order.
Key Works
- How Should a Person Be? (2010/2012)
- Motherhood (2018)
- Pure Colour (2022)
Collecting Heti
The Middle Stories first edition (Anansi, 2001) — Canadian small-press debut — is scarce, $50–$200. How Should a Person Be? first Canadian edition (Anansi, 2010) precedes the US edition (Holt, 2012) and is the true first. Signed copies are available at readings and events. Heti’s market is literary-intellectual rather than broadly commercial, making first editions affordable but appreciating steadily.