Motherhood, by Sheila Heti
Yes yes yes yes yes.
Do you ever just pick up a book and almost from the first feel: yes, yes, this is it, this is what writing should be like; well done writer, you are what we are here for. That was how I felt with Motherhood; Heti is so so so so good.*
*caveat: later the same day I wrote this I picked the book up again and wasn't as smitten. I don't think the book got weaker, I think this might just be a book where you have to catch it in a particular mood. (inb4 everyone: maybe this is true of all books)
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The book starts with Heti doing a version of the I Ching, flipping three coins and getting answers to her yes-no questions. (She says in the preamble that all the coin flips were real). The way she makes this "trick" add up is basically by asking further clarifications/questions if/when the answer doesn't come out "right" -- e.g. asking the I Ching
"Maybe I shouldn't have said I wanted to explain it to myself, but rather, explain it to other people, is that better?""No""To embody it rather than explain it?""Yes"
This is so good! It's such a perfect embodiment of life and luck and decision-making.
(Heti on same):
It's useful, this, as a way of interrupting my habits of thoughts with a yes or a no. I feel like my brain is becoming more flexible as I use these coins. When I get an answer I didn't expect I have to push myself to get another answer, hopefully a better one. It's an interruption of my complacency, or at least that's what it feels like, to have to dig a little deeper, to be thrown off. My thoughts don't just end where they normally would. At the same time, by this age, I feel like I've accepted myself on a certain level. So throwing coins is not self-annihilating, which it would be if I still despised myself. Or do I still despise myself? No. Did I ever? No no, it was all make believe, even then. Even when it seemed like I did, I was still so grateful to have been born.
(More Heti, her talking to the coins):
"Is any of the above true?"
"No."
"Is there any use in any of this if none of it is true?"
"No"
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The book to me feels more like a series of meditations or aphorisms than a traditional novel -- it reminds me of [[Meditations by Marcus Aurelius]], which I didn't think was nearly as good. It nominally has a structure but to me it mainly felt like this jumble of amazing thoughts and lines tied together, flowing into each other. Heti really manages to express a staggering array of views about motherhood, childhood, and meaning -- all held loosely or tentatively, suggestions not assertions -- so many thoughts that I've had and never discussed with anyone, that I've wondered if other people have, and the feeling of the novel is almost like being inside a person's head while they circle around again and again on this big(gest) dilemma of life, if that person were just incredibly articulate and incisive and enthralling.
I suspect the rest of this book-thought will just be quotes from the book?
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some lines I liked:
Sometimes I feel it would be so easy to have Miles' baby; his flesh inside mine, his skin so nicely scented, so clean, so smooth; that brain, that heart, mixed with mine. When I describe this to Erica she said "you're not describing wanting his child in you; you're describing wanting his cock." I saw it was true.... Do I really want a child, or do I just want more of him? The child is not more of him; the child is not your boyfriend. When the child grows up and has sex with other people, they are especially not yours then.
Will you one day feel about the mothering instinct the same way you now feel about the sex instinct, which also suddenly turned on? Like that other passage you'll resist it, but in retrospect it took you, you didn't make a choice to go in that direction -- life, nature, pulled your strings. That's why you have no regrets about those years. And where did it land you? In a more interesting place; it resulted in a more interesting time. Is your body now pulling you towards motherhood, in the same way?"
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Are my qualities of deceitfulness, which he pointed out I had, which he said all women have, part of the biological imperative? That in order to breed and raise children, morality has not to matter? The only thing that matters is the life of the child, while all other values are relative? Is that how my brain has developed over millennia? If I choose now, decided, wasting no more time, not to have children, can I set myself on a course of reforming my mind, making myself unable to lie or deceive, as if the world or living people, and just these living bonds, matter most of all? Having the same amount of accountability as an accountable man? Just as a man might try to rid himself of all entitlement, violence, and need to dominate,could I eliminate from myself my desire to gossip, my petty interest in other lives, especially the darkest parts of the lives of all my female friends, and instead take responsibility for my actions and words, having decided that I won't ever meet a future with children, and all the joys and gratifications of that?"
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"My brother feels it was an unfair burden placed on him to have been forced to live without having been asked. I feel the opposite: that life is a beautiful and incredibly rare gift whose debt I will forever be in, and that I must spend my days paying back this debt." "Could having children be a way of repaying the debt? For some it must be, but it doesn't feel that way for me. I know how hard it is to have a child, but for me it would feel like an indulgence, an escape. I don't feel I deserve those pleasures; having a child does not relate to the duties that feel bound to my life."
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"Is that why I started thinking about having kids? Because one by one the ice flow on which we were all standing was broken and made smaller, leaving me alone on just the tiniest piece of ice, which I thought would remain vast, like a very large continent on which we'd all stay. It never occurred to me that I'd be the only one left here -- I know I'm not the only one left, but how can I trust the few who remain, when I'd been so mistaken about the rest. I'm shaken by their wholesale deserting, and then they changed their minds? Or had they never intended to stay, and then they changed their minds?"
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More small bits I liked:
> If she self defines as not-not a mother (as in her identity is not about not being a mother), but mothers can also say they are not not a mother, "this is the term we can share. In this way we are the same". This section is AMAZING, hard to convey here in words.
> not-having children is something parents also do, until they have children. And so parents feel like they know it, recognise it. But they don't! It's different to not-have children than just to have not had children yet
- "wanting not to have children could also be known as a sexual orientation. What is more tied to sex than wanting to procreate or not?"
- "as much as I can't see having a child, it's strange to imagine I actually won't."
> [both having and not having kids] "seem like a great feat. To go along with what nature demands and to resist it: both are really beautiful, impressive and difficult in their own ways."
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Sally Rooney reviewed Motherhood in the LRB and wrote
> The moral conundrum involved in the decision to create a new life can’t be resolved in the space of a novel – but Motherhood gives it sustained and serious attention. ‘I don’t see why it’s supposed to be so virtuous to do work that you created for yourself,’ Miles says at one point. ‘It’s like someone who digs a big hole in the middle of a busy intersection, and then starts filling it up again, and proclaims: filling up this hole is the most important thing in the world I could be doing right now.’ I was reminded of Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus: ‘To decide whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy.’ Camus meant that the only serious philosophical problem was that of suicide; it seems to me that the most serious philosophical problem could equally be that of parenthood: to decide whether or not life is worth bringing into existence
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Overall, loved this book, highly recommended almost regardless of your gender and not-not parenting plans.