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Published May 2018
288 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
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.
"Starred Review. 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." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. 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.'" - Booklist
"With each of her novels, Sheila Heti invents a new novel form. Motherhood is a riveting story of love and fate, a powerful inspiration to reflect, and a subtle depiction of the lives of contemporary women and men, by an exceptional artist in the prime of her powers. Motherhood constitutes its own genre within the many-faceted novel of ideas. Heti is like no one else." - Mark Greif, author of Against Everything
"This inquiry into the modern woman's moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response - finally - to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I've read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself." - Rachel Cusk, author of Outline and Transit
"I've never seen anyone write about the relationship between childlessness, writing, and mother's sadnesses the way Sheila Heti does. I know Motherhood is going to mean a lot to many different people - fully as much so as if it was a human that Sheila gave birth to - though in a different and in fact incommensurate way. That's just one of many paradoxes that are not shied away from in this courageous, necessary, visionary book." - Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and The Possessed
This information about Motherhood was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sheila Heti is the author of seven books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be? which was a New York Times Notable Book and was named a best book of the year by The New Yorker. She is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller Women in Clothes, and is the former Interviews Editor for The Believer magazine. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney's, Harper's, and n+1.
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