Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti studied at National Theatre School of Canada and University of Toronto. The recorded working language is English. Works named in the authority record are Pure Colour and How Should a Person Be? Distinctions recorded are Guggenheim Fellowship and Governor General's Award for English-language fiction.

• Name — Sheila Heti • Born — 25 December 1976 • Birthplace — Toronto, Ontario, Canada • Occupation — Writer • Language — English • Education — * University of Toronto • National Theatre School of Canada • North Toronto Collegiate Institute • St. Clement's School • Period — 2001–present • Website — sheilaheti.com

Sheila Heti was born on 25 December 1976 in Toronto. Her parents are Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Her brother is comedian David Heti. Sheila Heti attended St. Clement's School in Toronto. She graduated from North Toronto Collegiate Institute in Toronto. She then studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada (leaving the program after one year) and then art history as well as philosophy at the University of Toronto. Heti said that Marquis de Sade and Henry Miller are early literary influences of hers.

Heti's writing spans a variety of genres including plays, short fiction, and novels. She has contributed to periodicals such as Flare, London Review of Books, Brick, Open Letters, Maisonneuve, Bookforum, n+1, the Look, McSweeney's, The New Yorker, and the New York Times. Her books have been published internationally, including France, Italy, Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Denmark. She formerly worked as the interviews editor at The Believer where she conducts interviews regularly. She contributed a column on acting to Maisonneuve. Heti is the creator of Trampoline Hall, a popular monthly lecture series based in Toronto and New York at which people speak on subjects outside their areas of expertise. The New Yorker praised the series for "celebrating eccentricity and do-it-yourself inventiveness". It has sold out every show since its inception in December 2001. For the early part of 2008, Heti kept a blog called The Metaphysical Poll, where she posted the dreams people had in their sleep about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary season, which readers submitted.

Heti was an actress as a child and as a teenager appeared in shows directed by Hillar Liitoja, the founder and artistic director of the experimental DNA Theatre. She appears in Margaux Williamson's 2010 film Teenager Hamlet and plays Lenore Doolan from Leanne Shapton's book Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. In November 2013, Jordan Tannahill directed Heti's play All Our Happy Days Are Stupid at Toronto's Videofag. It was remounted in February 2015 at The Kitchen in New York. Her decade-long struggle to write the play is a primary plot element in her novel How Should a Person Be?

Heti's first book, The Middle Stories, a collection of thirty short stories, was published by House of Anansi in Canada in 2001 when she was twenty-four. It was published by McSweeney's in the United States in 2002. It has been translated into German, French, Spanish, and Dutch.

Heti's novella, Ticknor, was released in 2005. The novel's main characters are based on real people: William Hickling Prescott and George Ticknor, although the facts of their lives are altered. It was published by House of Anansi Press in Canada, Farrar, Straus & Giroux in the United States, and Éditions Phébus in France.

Heti's How Should a Person Be? was published in September 2010. She describes it as a work of constructed reality, based on recorded interviews with her friends, particularly the painter Margaux Williamson. It was published by Henry Holt in the United States in July 2012 in a slightly different edition (she has spoken in interviews about the edits she made), and the subtitle "A Novel from Life" was added. It was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012 and by James Wood of The New Yorker as one of the best books of the year. It was also included on year-end lists on Salon, The New Republic, The New York Observer, and more publications. In her 2007 interview with Dave Hickey for The Believer, she noted, "Increasingly I'm less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just–I can't do it."

In 2011, she published The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which she wrote with her friend, Misha Glouberman. The New Yorker called it "a triumph of conversational philosophy" and named it one of the Best Books of 2011.

McSweeney's commissioned the children's book from Heti; it was illustrated by Clare Rojas.

In Fall 2014, Heti published a non-fiction book about women's relationship to what they wear, with co-editors Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits. It was a crowd-sourced book, featuring the voices of 639 women from around the world. The book was published by Penguin in the US and the UK, with a German edition published in 2015 by S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main. It was on The New York Times Best Seller list for several months.

In May 2018, Heti published an autobiographical novel, Motherhood, focused on her deliberation on whether to have children. Initially conceived as a non-fiction work, Heti explores the emphasis society places on motherhood and how women are judged regardless of their decision: "... a woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Nonmothers do, too." The book was named as a shortlisted finalist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize. LitHub named her novel, Motherhood, as a Favorite Book of 2018 and a New York Times Critics Pick of 2018.

Pure Colour, a novel exploring the human condition, appeared in 2022. It was the winner of the Governor General's Award for English-language fiction at the 2022 Governor General's Awards. The novel is a meditation and exploration on creation, as the protagonist, Mira, is living in the "first draft of creation." Through Mira's journey of friendship, love, loss and grief, Heti simultaneously seeks what it means to create and what it means for oneself to be a product of creation. Creation is explored through the cosmology of the "creation story" and through art, interpersonal relationships and self-identity.

Alphabetical Diaries was released in early 2024. Heti had taken a decade's worth of diaries and ordered the sentences alphabetically, before spending another decade or so paring them down into a new book.

Heti lives in Toronto.

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• "The Raspberry Bush" • "Lilly in the Wintertime" • "The Poet and the Novelist as Roommates" • "Mermaid in a Jar" • "What Changed" • "Eleanor" • "The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea"

• "I Didn't Like Sitting With the Rattle for Hours." The Brooklyn Rail. 2017. • Heti, Sheila (September 2024) "The New Age Bible - On the origins of A Course in Miracles" Harper's. September 2024.

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* • Women in Clothes. Blue Rider Press. 2014.

• Interview with artist Frank Stella.