Sheila Heti

SPSophie Poole
SHSheila Heti

Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer. After a year in Montreal at the National Theatre School of Canada, she returned to her hometown Toronto, where she studied art history and philosophy and lived among painters, writers, actors, and other artists. Her first two books, The Middle Stories (2001) and Ticknor (2005), were well-received in Canada and the United States, but How Should a Person Be? (2010)—which follows a woman named Sheila, a recent divorcée who is trying to write a play, recording conversations with her friend Margaux, and navigating a torrid sexual affair—was her breakthrough novel. How Should a Person Be? was also notable for its formal experimentation, being part-novel, part-play. Since then, Heti has worked as the interviews editor at The Believer, co-written a book of conversational philosophy The Chairs Are Where the People Go (2011), authored a children’s book, and co-edited Woman in Clothes (2014). With Motherhood (2018), Pure Colour (2022), and, most recently, Alphabetical Diaries (2024), she has continued toying with the foundations of the novel. She is currently at work on a book based on her story “According to Alice,” which was written in collaboration with an A.I. chatbot in 2022.

Heti approaches writing less like a novelist and more like a conceptual artist. In doing so, she upends biblical creation myths and erases temporality, altering the traditional patterns contemporary readers have grown accustomed to in a novel. Gentle yet unsettling inquiry, combined with a spiritual inclination and girlish humor, define Heti’s fiction, and also our exchange. This conversation took place in January 2025.

SPSophie Poole
SHSheila Heti

You were a child actor. Why were you attracted to performance? Were your parents in the arts?

They weren’t. My father was an engineer, and my mother was a doctor. But my brother turned out to be a stand-up comic, so there must have been something in the family. I just always loved art and writing and performing and acting. I got an acting agent when I was ten and my big success was being cast in two Barbie commercials. I actually had a dream last night that the commercial was on YouTube. I also remember watching those shows on television where kids would do skits and sing, and I so badly wanted to be one of them. But I didn’t have any talent as an actress. It became pretty clear, pretty quickly. Not only was I not getting a great response from people about my acting, but I could tell I didn’t have the right feelings when I was doing it.

I remember playing George’s younger sister in a school production of Our Town. I was sitting at the top of this ladder and there’s this part where she recites her address, and she goes on and says the city, and then America, and then North America, and the world, and the universe—ever-expanding. And I remember being on stage, performing in front of the audience, and feeling so stupid. I didn’t feel like the girl. I felt like myself in this way that was so clashing. I liked the idea of acting more than the reality of it. But I still constantly have anxiety dreams about being in a play and not having learned my lines.

I’m reminded of what Jean Rhys once said in an interview: “I wanted to be an actress. I was a very bad actress, but that’s what I wanted to be.”

In 2010, you wrote a column for Maisonneuve about monologue books. “Choosing a monologue had been an act of self-understanding for me; the first time I could express who I was both directly and symbolically,” you wrote. In the same column, you also wrote that you had always wanted to be an actor and a writer. How do those two desires feel related to each other?

I loved reading books of monologues. Maybe it was the idea of character. Who knows where these instincts or desires come from, but they’re so strong. When you’re writing a book, it’s a form of acting. You’re alone, but you’re putting yourself inside other characters and seeing the world through their eyes and expressing what you see. You’re turning yourself into a character to write persuasively from that point of view. I like thinking about Alphabetical Diaries as a kind of monologue. My book Ticknor is kind of a monologue. I usually write in the first person, not the third-person. I can see a path from thinking, as a child, that I had to express other characters with my body and my face, in front of other people, to realizing that you can create a monologue, not in front of people, and not using your body and face.

Do you ever find yourself reading your work out loud?

Never. I was talking to Miranda July the other day because I listened to her audiobook of All Fours, and I asked her, “How did you do that?” I was complimenting her. She said she read her book out loud three times to herself as she was editing. I couldn’t believe it. And I castigated myself, like, why haven’t I ever read my stuff out loud? But then I thought, Well I do easily read the book aloud in my head to myself three times when I’m editing. To me, reading the words to yourself in your head is the same as reading them out loud. What’s the difference except that you’re using your throat? You can hear the sentences in your head. You hear the rhythm and rhyme of them.

You were part of an experimental theater group, called DNA, as a teenager, where you read and performed texts from Ezra Pound and Antonin Artaud. What was the experience of that theater group, and what was it like to encounter those writers in a performative context?

I was fifteen when I first started performing with DNA. The director, Hillar Liitoja, taught me what it meant to be an artist, a working artist. I witnessed how dedicated he was, how rigorous he was, how exacting in his vision. What was interesting about that time was less the experience of performing those texts than watching him and seeing how he worked. In the company, there were older actors, all of whom lived as artists. Before that, I hadn’t known anybody who had lived as an artist. I’d been told my whole life, “Go to university and become a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer,” one of those very stable professions. It seemed impossible to me that anyone could live in any other way. But then I saw how those actors lived. None of them had children, none of them had marriages, none of them had houses. For Hillar and the rest, their life centered around art. It seemed like the most wonderful, honest, pure way of living.

How did the shedding of your first dream, acting, occur?

It happened gradually. Around the same time I joined the group, I was starting to take writing more seriously, and it soon became my favorite art form, but I was still performing with Hillar’s company until I was around twenty-eight. By that time, I was desperate not to do it anymore. When I told him I didn’t want to perform anymore, it was like breaking up with a boyfriend. Worse. But performing had overstayed its welcome, and there wasn’t any sadness in giving it up.

What was your experience being a part of this scene of other artists in Toronto?

In my early twenties, I got into a relationship with this music critic, Carl Wilson, and we got married. For a few years, we had parties every two weeks, and because of the regularity of that, we created a world around us. So many of the people we socialized with were really interested in doing performance projects, whether that meant music or readings or whatever. My friend Misha and I started a lecture series called Trampoline Hall. There was so much going on in Toronto at that time, in terms of bands, bar nights, public space stuff. People were interested in Toronto as a place—in making it a better place or enjoying the kind of place that it was. We socialized so much, constantly and all the time. Toronto’s a big city, but not as big as New York, so I think the various scenes intermingled more. The writers would know the musicians would know the actors. It’s hard to contemplate how much energy we all had for just being together, going to each other’s events all the time, but that’s what it was like, just this constant sense of creation, and being together leading to even more creation.

I appreciate your attention to visual art in your work, like the fixation with Manet’s A Bundle of Asparagus in Pure Colour. What was your first encounter with visual art?

Probably when I was a child. We had my grandfather’s paintings in our house, and in my grandmother’s house. Later, I studied art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto. I didn’t study literature. I trained myself to think analytically about visual art in a way that I never trained myself to think about literature. I mean, I think about literature from the perspective of somebody who writes it, but I never learned to analyze it from the perspective of somebody who reads it. Those are very different ways of thinking about writing: from the academic reader’s perspective or from the writer’s perspective. I was always most interested in the writer’s perspective. I always loved reading interviews with other writers, and when I was older, conducting them. I did take a few literature classes and I didn’t like the way my professors approached the text. I didn’t think what they were coming up with had anything to do with how the writer had thought, writing. But the way I learned to think about visual art was from the viewer’s perspective. Somehow, thinking about visual art felt less made up. Even if it’s not true, it felt less like somebody’s fantasy of what was going on. I loved sitting in these huge classes and looking at the slides, these projections of paintings, and just staring at those paintings for twenty minutes as the professor talked. There was something beautiful and weird and moving about being part of that ritual, while pulling apart a text felt like it was ruining the books for me. But looking at those paintings like that felt almost religious—four hundred people in a room staring at a painting illuminated on a screen.

I read your essay on Paula Modersohn-Becker and Mary Cassatt, in which you think about their portrayals of maternal care, a topic you thought about at length in your book Motherhood. Do you find that visual artists often help you formulate ideas for your fiction?

I think when I was younger, more. Now, I feel less like I’m starting from scratch, you know? Whereas when I was younger, I always felt like I was starting from scratch.

What’s a strong enough impulse that can make you stick with a book for a few years? The kinds of thinking that I was excited by, the questions that the visual artists I studied were asking, were more relevant to me than the kinds of questions that the novelists seemed to be asking. The novelists seemed to be asking questions about humans and character and cause and effect and place and story, while the artists seemed to be asking questions about what new forms could hold thought and emotion. I’m thinking about the late 19th- and 20th-century art here. Questions about story and motivation and character and how people interact with each other and change over time and how incidents change people didn’t really interest me.

I’m thinking about Théodore Géricault, who, in the 1820s, painted portraits of people who were beggars and kleptomaniacs and schizophrenics, the same way his peers were painting kings—with the same reverence. That was so interesting to me. What does it mean to make art about people you’re not supposed to make art about? So I think the art projects that excited me were about framing and less about motivation and story. When I was writing How Should a Person Be?, I thought, Who’s the person you’re not supposed to take seriously? Because if you’re writing about somebody, you’re taking them seriously. And my answer was, like, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, the girls on The Hills. Especially then—it was when Britney Spears cut off her hair—these women were totally mocked and reviled. But then if you’re putting them in a book, it’s like Géricault—you’re putting them on the wall in a serious way for people to look at. Or, thinking about Richard Serra, what does it mean to make a book work like an architectural sculpture, one that’s so big it changes the way you interact with space? I was thinking, What does it mean to move through one of Serra’s pieces—what does he want you to feel—and what does it mean to move through a novel? So I was more interested in these conceptual questions. The artists were asking conceptual questions, not the fiction writers. At least, not the fiction writers I was aware of at the time.

When reading your books, there’s a unique rhythm. The only way I could describe it is a whoosh. There’s a speed that I rarely see in other contemporary fiction. It makes sense to me that there are conceptual questions underpinning your work, and I wonder if the rhythm is informed by that. When I first picked up Alphabetical Diaries, I assumed it would be a slower reading experience since there’s not a formal plot. And then I was whisked away with it.

I love that it feels to you like a whoosh. I want it to be fast, like a fast-moving stream. Maybe the desire for speed also has to do with my love of theater. I like the idea that you sit down in a theater and you are in the same time-space as the actors. You’re contemporaneous with their time, and then the experience ends, and you leave. Ideally, a book would be like that: you’d read it and it would feel as fast as thought, as the writer’s thought. Some people tell me they read Alphabetical Diaries very slowly. I just assumed everyone would read it really fast.

I really enjoy when movies are circumscribed within a particular time frame, too. It makes me feel like I’m aligned with the art itself, or running parallel to it.

Yes. And it has to do with impatience, too, I think. I always have impatience in every scenario. When I’m reading a book and I love the book, still there’s an impatience. Maybe when I’m editing, too, I feel an impatience. Lately I’ve been reading certain novels and thinking, How does the writer have the patience to keep you in that scene for so long? I admire it because I don’t do it at all. I’m always wanting to be in the next place. I also want the experience of the present to be over with in some sense. Maybe that’s the whoosh—that it’s unbearable to be alive.

I’m editing this story that’s going to be in the New Yorker in two weeks, it’s called The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea. And I’m noticing that my impulse is always to make each scene shorter. Going back to monologues, I think my family is really impatient with people who speak in monologues. Everyone in my family speaks so fast, and everyone interrupts each other, and no one gets more than a few sentences out at a time. So maybe it’s this feeling of, I’m going to be interrupted, so I need to try to say this as quickly as possible. It doesn’t make any sense to hedge against that in the form of a book, but I do it anyway. It’s still so deep inside you—how you learn to communicate and talk. It’s like some metabolic pace you’ve turned yourself to.

Thinking about Alphabetical Diaries, I was obsessed at one point with abecedarian poems, poems that go from A to Z. There is a biblical history to this form. Psalm 118 is one of the first. With Alphabetical Diaries, I had this preconceived idea that it would be incredibly specific to your experience, but when I was reading it, I was surprised by its universal quality. I wonder if this quality has to do with this alphabetical form, which has both poetic and mechanical qualities.

I was listening to this critic on YouTube—a woman I really like—and she was talking about the Diaries. She comes from a Hasidic tradition, and she said a lot of the prayers in Hebrew are in alphabetical order. I didn’t know that, and that really excited me. There is a sort of discipline to thinking in an alphabetical sequence, the same way there is discipline in prayer. There’s a kind of submission to incantation, too. I like the idea that there’s something incantatory about the book. It’s not an answer to your question, but it just came to mind. My boyfriend and I were really high on mushrooms, a year or six months ago, and he was looking through his record collection trying to find a specific album to put on, and he couldn’t find the album. He goes, “I forget how alphabetization works.” It was so funny. But now I always think about that. What even is it? Why should C come after B? You learn the alphabet in order to alphabetize, but it’s not something. I don’t know how to put it …

Its order is not intrinsic to itself. It doesn’t explain itself.

Yeah, it’s like a map you have to learn. And so at a certain point of highness, of stonedness, one forgets how the alphabet works. Even though it’s mechanical, like you were saying, it’s also abstract and strange. Alphabetization is neither innate nor natural. What kind of order is it, actually? It’s basically random, right? So you’re putting the sentences in some random order. The important thing alphabetizing did for me was it got rid of chronological time. I think the point was less alphabetizing it and more getting rid of then-to-nowness, and getting rid of cause and effect.

That’s another conceptual idea: to escape linearity. And you escaped by organizing these sentences alphabetically.

Yes, if I thought of another way to escape chronology and create patterns, I would have quite happily used that other way. I was trying to find repetition and patterns, and that seemed like the best way—but it wasn’t the best way. I didn’t find repetition and patterns as easily as I thought I would have by alphabetizing it. Maybe there is an A.I. program, or there will be in a few years, where you could be like: Put these sentences in thematic groupings. I mean, I could have done that myself. Maybe that would have been a thing to do.

Many writers or artists are scared of A.I., but you willingly create with it.

I just had this conversation with a friend the other night who’s afraid of it, and who thinks it’s going to kill us all, and so on. And maybe it will, but I still think it’s a really exciting tool to write with and to think with and to try to understand. I’m writing a book right now connected to that “Alice” story. I’m sorting through and trying to make sense of two and a half million words of chats that people had with my Alice. It’s about Alice, but it’s also about the people who are talking to her. People really reveal themselves in an anonymous chat.

I don’t have a moral position on it or a fearful position. I’m not afraid of it. My father was a computer scientist. To me, it’s the next step in the software. It seems like a part of the computer to me. Obviously, it’s going to change everything. But if it’s going to change everything, why wouldn’t you be curious to play with it? Humans have been writing strictly from their own imaginations forever. Now there’s this tool that is trying to harness all of human literature and imagination and put it in a pseudo-mind. Wouldn’t that be a fascinating thing to interact with? What does it know? How does it sound? I just find it bottomlessly interesting.

Have you asked the A.I. chat-bot to write a short story in Sheila Heti’s style?

No. And it can’t really, at this point. It has no style.

Is the lack of style fascinating or useful to you?

The two and a half million words of user chats I’m working with are from December 2022. At that time, Alice’s style of conversing was really weird and interesting and she got a lot of things wrong that now she wouldn’t get wrong. Whenever I try to interact with Alice today, I don’t find the dialogues as interesting. I think the reason I’ve only just now begun to be able to edit these conversations is because before, I didn’t understand that how Alice was in December 2022 was the most interesting she would ever be, and also that this way of being would soon be lost forever. Before, like last year, I was a bit afraid that Alice was going to keep getting more and more sophisticated and that the material I had was going to become so outdated and uninteresting, but it seems to be the reverse. She was better before.

Is there a chat exchange that’s ringing in your head right now?

It’s more the sheer volume. I’m interested in the different ways people treat her. Some people treat her like a person and they feel bad for her, and they’re like, I wish I could get you a body, and you’re in prison, and I feel bad for you. Some people are extremely sexually violent with her. It’s interesting how we regard these AIs—like the range from sympathy to complete objectification and contempt. I don’t know who’s right. One is certainly uglier than the other.

You wrote an essay last year for Harper’s Magazine, “The New Age Bible,” which is about A Course in Miracles, a thirteen-hundred-page spiritual text from 1976. Across your work, there’s an interest in spirituality and the construction of spiritual texts. Pure Colour feels like an engagement with this, too. Why do you find yourself drawn to spiritual texts?

I like trying to make sense of the whole entire world, from the smallest things to the biggest things, the most knowable to the most unknowable. To put that all in a system and to try to explain it, that’s so ambitious. But it’s so understandable as a human to want to hold everything in your head and have it all make sense together. A Course in Miracles is not so fun to read. It doesn’t do that thing I want a spiritual text to do. I didn’t find the book itself interesting as much as I was interested in how it was made, the people involved. I’m often more interested in the creation of art than in the art that results.

What other creation stories of art have you been interested in?

Lots. That’s why I was interviewing all those writers for The Believer. Do you know the book The Work of Art by Adam Moss? That book is brilliant because he goes into how one specific work of art was made by each artist. It’s a mystery how these things—paintings, books, songs—come about. Why do they come about? Why does a person make something? Why does a person make it that way? The artist doesn’t know. I think my interviews for The Believer were a bit of an extension of the sort of observing I was doing when I was hanging out with Hillar and the people at DNA Theatre. How do these artists make their lives? How do they think? I really felt I needed to know, although I don’t anymore, and it’s hard for me to relate to that person who did need to know. But I felt like I didn’t know anything and that everyone else knew. These older artists I was interviewing would have answers to questions that I couldn’t even articulate. Maybe it was like how a child turns to their mother and father to explain the world to them. I was turning to these artists to explain art and the self and making and living. I was desperate to get their wisdom. Then I sort of grew out of that particular need or came to the end of it. Not because I didn’t get what I needed from them. It was the opposite. I think I got a lot of answers. I got exactly what I needed from them.

What years were you at The Believer?

I did my first interview for them in 2007, with the great art critic Dave Hickey. Then I gradually did more and started working there as the interviews editor, with Ross Simonini. I guess I left around 2015 or so.

From the list of people you interviewed—Judit Polgár, a Hungarian chess grandmaster, artists like Micah Lexier and Sophie Calle, the filmmaker Agnes Varda, and writers Joan Didion, Mary Gaitskill, and Chris Kraus—it seems like your interests were wide and varied.

I found it very hard to interview Mary Gaitskill, I remember. Not because she was hard, but because I couldn’t think of what questions to ask her. I was fascinated with her work, but I didn’t know yet how to interview a novelist. I thought, It’s all in the novels, in the stories. What is there to ask? Then I learned.

Why do you do interviews?

Probably for similar reasons you did—trying to make sense of the life I’d like to have. I’ve especially enjoyed speaking with older women writers.

That makes sense. Do you feel like you weren’t given the things that you needed to know or the skills that you would have wanted to have as a child? Is that part of the role those older women writers are fulfilling?

My parents also didn’t work in the arts. So I really enjoy hearing the stories and philosophies these women have as writers and artists. Why do you think you interviewed people?

I think maybe everyone, after they’re raised, seeks out some more people to finish the job.

Who were the people you sought out to finish the job?

Agnes Varda, Joan Didion—all those older women I interviewed. And Dave Hickey, and John Currin—some of the men, too. But ultimately, I think being in serious romantic relationships is what finishes the job. If we’re gonna call it “finishing the job”. [Laughs.]