Sheila Heti—whose new story “Earthly Delights,” about the mysteries of lust, appears in this week’s issue—wrote one of my favorite books ever: “Motherhood.” The narrator is in her thirties, watching her fortieth birthday tick closer and trying to decide if she wants to get pregnant. “Whether I want kids is a secret I keep from myself,” she thinks. “It is the greatest secret I keep from myself.” In her search for answers, things get philosophical, mystical, emotional. The book was the first by Heti that I read, and my admiration for it—shared by many people—kicked off a deep dive into her body of work, which also includes the wonderful “How Should a Person Be?” I recently asked her about her own reading habits and recommendations.
Our conversation has been edited and condensed.
What is your favorite book to recommend?
“Two Serious Ladies,” by Jane Bowles. It’s so original, and completely follows its own rules and logic, and it is so funny. I thought about it again last night after watching “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Bowles and Tennessee Williams were very good friends. He called her “the most important writer of prose fiction in modern American letters,” although I didn’t know that when I first read her, in my early twenties. I would have been surprised: she seemed to have come out of no milieu, to have lived in nothing so literal as a city, or in something as ordinary as time. It’s a book like no other, and I’m sure I would have written completely differently if I had never read it.
Which book has taught you the most about another medium?
I’m not sure if a department store can be considered “another medium,” but I love Émile Zola’s “The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames),” from 1883, which is as brilliant as any book could be about marketing, advertising, the rapacious swallowing up of smaller shops by larger ones, and the hard life of being a salesgirl from the provinces, trying to earn a living in Paris.
I love all the delicious details of the store’s wares: enticing displays of umbrellas, lace, linen, and gloves. And how Zola, having researched Le Bon Marché (one of the first modern department stores), works into his story all the inventive ways his capitalist visionary, Octave Mouret, fans the flames of his female customers’ desire for new and beautiful things, likening his methods to how the seducer stirs up lust in a woman. It’s just one of my favorite novels.
Is there a book best suited to reading while in transit?
I read Vigdis Hjorth’s “If Only” at the subway station, then on the subway, then in the airport, then on the plane across the ocean, then in the taxi after landing, then finally in the hotel. I can’t separate the feeling of movement and travel from the feelings that book gave me: the vertigo of falling disastrously in love with exactly the wrong man, being shunned by him, taken up by him again, suffering from the love, and all the twists and turns of the relationship which the book depicts.
