On the other, she does sometimes dream that she has a child, and sometimes when she wakes from these dreams she feels happy. But how can she tell? On the one hand, she has never dreamed of being a mother. He has a child from a previous relationship and no desire for another, but he’ll have a baby with the narrator if it’s what she really wants. She lives in Toronto with her partner, Miles. The narrator of Motherhood is in her mid-thirties. Should she have a child? And while a woman can keep wondering how she should be for the whole of her life, whether to reproduce is a decision that can’t wait forever. This question is a problem for the opposite reason: it has only two possible answers, and they’re mutually exclusive. The unnamed narrator of Motherhood, who shares various biographical details with the narrator of How Should a Person Be?, and with Heti herself, is also preoccupied with a question. The problem with this question, as she discovers, is that it’s infinitely open-ended no two people give the same answer, or behave in the same way. ‘For years and years I asked it of everyone I met,’ the narrator says. Sheila Heti’s last novel, How Should a Person Be?, opens with the question of its title.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |