Motherhood
A Novel
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3.9 • 22 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With this autobiographical novel, Sheila Heti opens a trapdoor into her brain as she wrestles with her desire to not have children. Her thoughts loop, zigzag, and backtrack, tangibly demonstrating how difficult it is for a woman to forge a distinct path that’s not the norm. The main character grapples with her thorny relationship with her mother and her fiery, challenging, and fulfilling love story. She reflects on the tension between the creative life and the slog of parenting and exposes the patriarchal ideas that primarily value women as portals for bringing new people into the world. Motherhood is a special, stunningly written book that will spark conversations among women and men, no matter where their paths have taken them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Thanks Sheila!
Women have only had the true choice whether or not to have babies for a generation or two. We modern females, particularly those of us that may have never imagined ourselves as mothers and/or are grappling with the multitudes of aspects of this fundamentally life-determining decision, need more authors like Sheila Heti to illuminate the debates and considerations. Also given the incredible pressure on women to become mothers, I love that she defended and honored the female artist, the female who decides to live an alternative life. We certainly need more of that support.