Sheila Heti hadn’t intended to write a book about grief, but in late 2018, about a year after she’d started writing her new novel, Pure Colour, her father died. “He had been sick, but it was always going to be a shock. It has been the most profound change I’ve experienced in adulthood, having a parent die. Mother and father are connected to what life is, and you know all along they aren’t the sky, the earth – they’re people. But while your mind knows it, maybe your body doesn’t,” she says. As a result of the shock, she adds, the story in her book “suddenly breaks”.
Heti and I are sitting in her cosy second-floor apartment in Toronto, which she shares with her boyfriend of 11 years, Luc, and their friendly rottweiler, Feldman. Outside, a blizzard blows, but Feldman keeps us both warm by snoozing on our feet. A mutual friend had told me beforehand that the 45-year-old Heti “will seem young to you”, and, with her girlish voice and 1990s teenager outfit of a long-sleeved T-shirt beneath a cotton blue dress, she does at first. But she seems older than I expected, too. Her short, pixie-like fringe, which she had when she wrote her previous bestselling novels, 2010’s How Should a Person Be? and 2018’s Motherhood, has gone (“I just grew out of it”), and she has a quietness and perceptiveness that is often overlooked by critics, who mistake her originality for kookiness. It is easy to imagine her, simultaneously, as the precociously artsy girl she once was and the pin‑sharp older woman she will one day be.
Pure Colour exemplifies both that originality and sharpness. It encompasses the beginning and end of the world, and Adam and Eve, as well as her character Mira’s entire life, all within a slim 200 and some pages; it’s the kind of book that you start reading again as soon as you finish it, to see how on earth the author pulled it off. “With my other books, I thought as I was writing: ‘OK, this friend is going to read this and I want the book to tell this to them.’ But with this book there was no thought of that. I just felt completely cut off and it became more intuitive,” Heti says. As a result, the novel has a dreaminess to it, and some sections read as though they come straight from Heti’s subconscious, such as when Mira’s grief for her father so overwhelms her that she becomes, for quite an extended time, a leaf. “That was how [grief] felt for me – not so much being out of my body, but just feeling very far from everyone and not part of the active world,” Heti reflects.
As a teenager growing up in Toronto, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants, Heti loved books by writers such as Henry Miller, Edmund White and the Marquis de Sade. They gave her a sense of the novel as a medium without a template: she could do anything that she wanted with it. In the very funny and tender How Should a Person Be?, a late-twentysomething called Sheila mooches around Toronto and New York and talks with her friends – sometimes in prose, sometimes in script format – as she tries to answer the eponymous question.
In the more interior and occasionally feverish Motherhood, a late-thirtysomething, also called Sheila, mooches around Toronto, talks with her friends and boyfriend, Miles, and tries to figure out if she wants to have a baby.
The novels might sound similar, but they are completely different in tone and mood, with the earlier work capturing the self-awareness and self-doubt of one’s 20s, and the latter mining the panic and anxiety that besets a certain kind of thirtysomething. Because they feature so much autobiography, many critics described them as autofiction, akin to Karl Ove Knausgård and Rachel Cusk. Heti used to wince at the word, but now accepts that “it’s a useful term because it helps people’s expectations of the book. I just call it fiction, though. All writers use their lives. Look at Proust – it’s all fucking autofiction,” she says. Her repeated use of autobiography means that Heti’s books illuminate one another: in Motherhood, she writes that her mother’s criticism of her as a child made her “desperate to live as a person beyond criticism; to prove that I was better than any of the ways she saw me”, which casts a new light on the title of her first novel. Motherhood focuses primarily on her complicated relationship with her mother, while her father, the playful caregiver, is glimpsed only in the shadows. Now, in Pure Colour, she brings him into the light.
Unlike the previous two books, Pure Colour is written in the third person, and it is not asking a central question: the narrator is entirely certain what she’s talking about, telling the reader from the start why people are how they are, and why the world is as it is. This is partly a reflection of Heti herself – “Yes, I do feel more certain in myself now,” she agrees – and also because this is a novel about middle age, that point in life when “the party is happening behind a closed door”, as the book puts it, when there aren’t so many questions to be asked, just things to deal with.
Initially, pure colour feels wistful and lightly satirical, with the narrator explaining that we are all living in God’s “first draft of existence”. Mira marvels at the passing of time since her youth, before the internet and social media, and what she describes as “the friendship revolution, which made being in touch of primary importance”. But then, suddenly, Mira’s father dies, and the story becomes something Heti was not expecting. “I didn’t think the experience [of my father dying] would be part of the book, but then I thought, ‘Oh, first draft of existence …’ It feels like you’re in the second draft, after the death of a parent, because it is like the world has ended, right? I saw how all of those things came together,” she says.
No writer likes to be told their novel is reminiscent of someone else’s, so it is with some trepidation that I tell her at times Pure Colour made me think of Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize last year, and which also combines grief with jokey observations about how technology has changed the world. She nods.
“Yes, Patricia and I are friends, and a few years ago we were telling each other about our books, and I said, ‘These books have a lot in common!’ So we exchanged manuscripts and, structurally, they feel very similar,” she says.
For me, Heti’s is the stronger book, with descriptions of grief that are so surprising and true they made me gasp: “She had thought that, when someone died, it would be like they went into a different room,” she writes. “She had not known that life itself transformed into a different room, and trapped you in it without them.”
In her previous books, Heti has written with similar honesty about love and sex. Does it ever feel exposing to write about such personal experiences? “I never feel exposed because there’s nothing inside me that isn’t in you. All writing is about all of us, so it doesn’t feel like I’m saying anything that isn’t just about the human experience,” she says.
Yet choosing not to have a child simply because you don’t want one, as Sheila decides in Motherhood, is not a universal experience. That book sparked reams of commentary, either celebrating or questioning Heti’s reasoning. I contribute further to it by telling her the one part of the book that frustrated me was Sheila’s belief that she had to make a choice between pursuing her art and having a baby. Why couldn’t her partner look after the baby while she got on with her art?
“Do you have children?” she asks, establishing the lay of the land here.
I tell her I do.
“I know lots of artists who have children, so that’s not the reason why I didn’t have them, because I thought I couldn’t make art,” she says. The reason she didn’t have children, Heti says, is because she didn’t want to, and that’s all that needs saying. “But you have to have reasons,” she adds wryly.
Has she ever regretted making that decision so publicly, given she will be asked about it for the rest of her life? She thinks about that for a moment.
“No, because I like that book,” she says, and laughs.
As a child, Heti loved to act and write, putting on shows with her friends and writing stories with her father. She eventually decided that she had to choose between the two to better her chances at becoming good at something. She made her name writing for the literary journal the Believer, but left that to work on a collaborative book, Women in Clothes, which she has described as “a conversation among hundreds of women” about their fashion choices. As well as that and her novels, she has written a play, a novella, a collection of stories, two children’s books and another collaborative publication, this one about philosophy. She loves books “above all”, she says, and we are surrounded by shelves stuffed with the classics – Gide, Flaubert, Tolstoy. Heti peppers her conversation with book recommendations: Adelle Waldman’s 2013 debut, The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P; Acts of Service by Lillian Fishman, another debut which will be published in the UK this summer; and the recent autobiographical novel Fuccboi by Sean Thor Conroe, about a secretly very un-woke young man who is shagging around and trying to get his book published. “There are so many good writers!” she says happily, and the inspiration she takes from them is that “they do their own thing so well, so you need to figure out what your thing is”. One recent discovery is The Wall by Marlen Haushofer, an Austrian dystopian novel originally published in 1963. “It’s out of print at the moment and it makes you sick, because, if she wasn’t a woman, everyone would be reading it, like Robinson Crusoe,” Heti says.
Does she think books by women still get treated differently from those by men?
“Totally. It’s been really interesting reading the reviews for Fuccboi and comparing them to my reviews for Motherhood. Critics give him the benefit of the doubt, assume he knows what he’s doing, that he’s made conscious choices. No one’s saying, ‘[The character] is the author.’ But with Motherhood, critics were very critical of the character as a person, which surprised me.”
By now, the blizzard has become a full snow storm and there are no taxis to be found. I say I’ll leave her be and go for a walk, but Heti insists I stay, and so we sit and chat about our lives for a further 45 minutes. Luc comes home and the two of them talk to one another with the kind of flirtatious frisson you rarely see in couples who have been together for more than a decade. I ask her if he’s Miles from Motherhood, and she hesitates.
“He’s who I was with when I wrote it, yes,” she says, carefully delineating between her life and her books.
We talk more about Motherhood and she asks if I ever regret having children. I say no, because I’d have been bereft without them. But of course, I say, looking around at her bookshelves, there are times when I miss my old life, when I could stay home alone all day and read and write in peace.
“So your ideal self is to be a happily child-free woman,” she says. I agree, and I can see her filing that on an internal index card in her brain. Then she looks at me and grins.
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• Pure Colour by Sheila Heti is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
