Motherhood - Paperback

by Sheila Heti (Author)

Shortlisted for the Giller Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, New York Magazine, Vulture (#1 of 2018), NPR, Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, Chicago Tribune, Bustle, Lit Hub, Refinery29, Bookforum, and Top Shelf

"Sheila Heti's book seems likely to become the defining literary work on the subject . . . It's hard to do justice to its complexity. This is less a book than a tapestry--a finely wrought work of delicate art."
--The Guardian

From the author of How Should a Person Be? comes a daring novel about whether or not 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.

Author Biography

Sheila Heti is the author of several 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.