"Like Jacob wrestles with the angel, Sheila Heti’s protagonist struggles to answer if raising a child is right for her. Every page contains some new revelation, and every revelation, every quandary or profound epiphany makes the ultimate act of decision-making more muddy and gray, often blurry and threatening. What would motherhood take from or give to a life of art, or any life at all? 'Not having a child is no escape from life,' she writes, 'for life will always put me in situations, and show me new things, and take me to darknesses I wouldn’t choose to see, and all sorts of treasures of knowledge I cannot comprehend.' Who knew that fiction could do this? All the problems of living are here, all the questions of giving life and sparing it."
Publisher Henry Holt and Co.
Publication Date 2018-05-01
Section New Hardcover - Fiction / All Staff Suggestions / Fiction Suggestions / Spencer R.
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9781627790772
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.
