I. “It’s strange—to like something so much.”

Madeline complains to Sheila about the current state of her life.

Sheila

Maybe it’s good to be miserable for a year.

Madeline

You think?

Sheila

As long as there’s an end point.

Madeline

I was wondering how you feel about giving interviews? You’ve done quite a lot of them. I tend to lie.

Sheila

Oh, interesting. I’d love to lie. That’s very Bob Dylan. What do you lie about?

Madeline

Like where I was when I had my first kiss or where I was born, just little insignificant details.

Sheila

You’re trying to protect yourself, or maybe protect your real life so it’s just you that has it and not the whole world.

Madeline

I never thought of it like that. I thought I might be a sociopath.

Sheila

I don’t lie. I don’t know. I like doing interviews because I like encountering the person that is interviewing me. I always enjoy having a conversation with a new person especially somebody that is required professionally to be interested in me—

Madeline laughs.

Sheila

I can get sick of interviews. It becomes terrible because you end up repeating yourself. There are only so many questions one can ask. If it’s something like this, which is not connected to a book that just came out, it’s more free and interesting and more unpredictable and more fun.

Madeline

Absolutely, I agree. Well, I’ll try to ask you more nuanced questions. I have read many of your interviews now, and I learned that you wanted to be a writer since you were 15. I wanted to hear a little bit about your younger self. And if there was a moment that solidified it for you?

Sheila

I mean, 15—I think about what you said about lying. Like that’s a weird number. I could also say 5 or I could say 21.

Madeline

Right.

Sheila

I could say 4th grade. We had a project where we had to write a little book, and that was the most seriously I’d ever taken anything, and I was kind of surprised to find myself taking it so seriously. I always do think about this question of like, how come this person became a singer and this person became a carpenter, you know—how come? Where does a passion for a specific thing come from?

Madeline

I’m nodding.

Sheila

Is it inborn? All my four-year-old nephew cares about is hockey. Where did that come from? That’s so specific. What if the game hockey didn’t exist? What would he care about? Why does it funnel into this really narrow pursuit? For me, why did it funnel into writing? Why did writing seem so much more engrossing an activity than anything else? That’s a really interesting mystery. It’s strange—to like something so much.

Madeline

Like, when you asked Joan Didion what would be her alternative path and she said, I think, marine biologist. That would have been so culturally devastating if Joan Didion had become a marine biologist.

Sheila

Maybe we would all care a lot more about marine biology.

Madeline

True. She would have written like the prominent text on manatees. I was wondering what your marine biologist is? If you had taken a different path…

Sheila

In a really bland sort of way, I’ve always wanted to be a magazine editor.

Madeline

Mhm.

Sheila

Which is not as different from writing as marine biology is from writing. I don’t think I have very many interests apart from moving words around. To answer that question properly, you have to imagine yourself good at other things, and I can’t really imagine myself good at anything else. It doesn't even make sense as a question because you would be a completely different person if you were good at other things than the things you're good at. Like if I was good at running I would be a completely different person, I think. So then I could say, oh, I'd love to be an Olympic long-distance runner…But how could I say that? I can’t even have that fantasy because that self is so far away.

Madeline

In How Should a Person Be? you talk about the high school career test, which had been phased out by the time I was in high school—how it told the character her ideal job was “hairdresser” and then she became one. I wonder what a computer would deem a good career for me based on data.

Sheila

I put that in because the character ends up working at a hair salon. Also, I ended up working at a hair salon. I actually enjoyed it. Quite a lot, in some ways more than writing. So I don’t think the career test was wrong.

Madeline

Really?

Sheila

Yeah, it was kind of a deep pleasure to work at the hair salon. Just to know what to do every day. To make the salon beautiful and to make people beautiful, though I didn’t cut hair, I only washed hair, but there still was this feeling of doing something magical for a person. You were transforming them or giving them the feeling that they were being transformed. There was something really special about it.

II. “At a certain point you are yourself.”

Madeline

I’m so curious, selfishly, to pry into your early career because that is sort of where I am.

The phone beeps inexplicably.

Madeline

You explained FSG acquiring Ticknor like the gates of heaven opening.

Sheila

Yeah.

Madeline

I’m wondering—to speak editorially—when you first felt like you “made it” as a writer?

Sheila

I mean, you have those moments but it’s never permanently the case. You have that feeling and then that feeling goes away and then comes, hopefully, back again. But I did have that feeling when FSG bought Ticknor. I felt like I was walking in a completely different universe from the one I’d been walking in an hour before. I was transformed. Everything around me was transformed. And I thought this is it. This is the end of my struggle.

Madeline

I remember that feeling.

Sheila

It’s so great. You’re like, oh wow, all my hopes for myself were not misguided. I was right, you know? And then my editor at FSG rejected How Should a Person Be? I remember actually being at the Yaddo writer’s retreat and I was working on How Should a Person Be? So it hadn’t been rejected yet. There was this older writer there and I probably said that my last book was published by FSG and he was like, I had a book published by FSG when I was young and then they never published another one of my books again. And I felt like somebody was telling me a horror story, you know? My blood ran cold. And then exactly that happened to me! So he cursed me by telling me that story.

Madeline

But it all worked out…

Sheila

Well, a lot of people wrote about that book and talked about it so even though FSG hadn’t published it, it did still feel that the book let people in America know that I was a writer because nobody really knew about Ticknor, even though FSG published it.

Madeline

You think this feeling of success or getting your footing kind of ebbs and flows?

Sheila

Well, everything ebbs and flows.

Madeline

Right, right.

Sheila

Happiness in a relationship, satisfaction with your own writing, the world’s interest in it. Everything is always constantly changing.

Madeline

They are reissuing the short story collection I wrote when I was 23—

Madeline

Who’s they? FSG?

Madeline

Picador.

Sheila

Fantastic. Their paperback line.

Madeline

I’m just glad to have it out with my name spelled right.

Sheila

They spelled your name wrong on the first printing of it?

Madeline

Yeah.

Sheila

How did that make you feel?

Madeline

I was so grateful to see something that I’d written printed out, not only by me at my public library, that it didn’t matter. They could have called me anything they wanted. But now it feels strange to have these stories that I wrote so young reemerge in the world and I was wondering how you feel about The Middle Stories now? Fond? Embarrassed?

Sheila

No, I still really like them. I mean, I feel like that about every book I’ve published. I still really love them all.

Madeline makes incredulous noise. Kind of a gasp.

Sheila

Maybe not about everything I’ve ever published in a magazine, you know, articles and stories, but I feel that way about all the books. I love The Middle Stories. I was 24 when I published it and I'd been working on it probably since I was 21 or 22, and that’s the main feeling I have when I look at them—that that’s what that time really felt like, and it’s a portal to that self and that time that is truer than any other portal could possibly be. If I read the stories, I know what it felt like inside myself, how lonely I felt, and how isolated and separate from the world. I don’t even think that I would have said that's how I felt at the time. But when I read the stories, I know that that’s actually how I felt. I don’t know. I like them.

Madeline

That’s so lovely to hear. I’m glad to know that we can grow and change, but look back on every iteration of self fondly.

Sheila

I think after a certain point you are yourself. If I was to look at the poems I wrote in high school, I would be mortified to read them, but then by your early 20s you are kind of yourself, or at least I was myself. So it’s familiar. I think what feels awful is looking back when you’re like, I don't even know who that person was.

Madeline

You need to send me the poems you wrote in high school.

Sheila

I tried, at the time, to get them published. I sent them around and I was so sad that no one would publish them as a book but thank God.

Madeline

Sometimes the world saves us from ourselves.

Sheila

Yes, exactly.

Madeline

That reminds me—you saying that you became yourself in your 20s—I wrote down this quote from your recent Lithub interview where you said, “there are two different selves, the public self, which is so fun, and the alone self, which is so fun.” This feels so actualized to me because my version of this quote would be, “there are two versions of the self, the public self, which is fun and the alone self, which is terrifying.”

Sheila

Uh-huh.

Madeline

Have you always liked being alone, or is that something you were able to grow into?

Sheila

I’ve always liked being alone. I still like it. Like when you were talking earlier about wanting a baby. I sort of thought, oh, that's somebody who kind of doesn’t want to be alone.

Madeline

Right.

Sheila

For me, the idea of having a baby is like, my god, you can’t be alone. That’s so terrifying to me. I would die if I couldn’t be alone a lot.

Madeline

I’m so afraid of being alone. I think I’ve had a boyfriend since the 8th grade.

Sheila

But how do you write if you don’t like being alone? Presumably you’re alone when you write, and you enjoy that.

Madeline

Yes, I do. But I think that there are ways to silence the…whatever’s scary about being alone. I will play music while I'm writing or work in a cafe. So I have parasocial company.

Sheila

Wow.

Madeline

I mean, this is a problem. I should probably go to a monastery for a couple months or something. Figure out who I am.

Sheila

Why? It’s working for you. Just be exactly who you are. You don’t need to like being alone. It’s completely unnecessary to like being alone.

Madeline

I feel like there’s this millennial emphasis on learning how to be with yourself. Um, and I—it’s not that I dislike myself. I'm pretty comfortable with the person I’ve become. But…I just really love companionship. I think I would have a sleepover every single night if I could.

Sheila

That’s such a beautiful quality. I don’t think you should try to be the opposite of who you are. That’s so stupid.

Madeline

Well, thank you for saying that.

Pause.

Madeline

I was wondering, again selfishly, how you feel about reviews and criticism. I have been horrified watching the press sort of take apart and then reassemble my book like it’s an IKEA shelf. Even the good press, it makes me feel really lonely. Do you read reviews?

Sheila

Yeah, I read them. I don’t enjoy what they give me, but I read them. My friend calls it cutting.

Madeline

A kind of masochistic thing.

Sheila

I want to know what people are thinking about the books, but actually reviews and even the reviews on Goodreads don’t really tell you because if I think about any books that I’ve read, no matter what I write about them, that still doesn’t really convey my experience of them. I feel like you read reviews to know how people responded because it’s kind of a conversation—you make something and then you want to know how other people received it. But while your book can be the total expression of your side of the conversation, the reviews can’t ever be the total expression of even one person’s experience of the book, because it’s a review, so it’s partial, and it has a purpose and its purpose is something after the fact. Their actual experience of reading it is something you can’t ever be inside of.

Madeline

Mm.

Sheila

And how they carry the book around in their head after they write the review is something you can’t be inside of, and how the book changes in their head, you know, a month, 6 months, a year after they’ve written the review, is also something you don’t have access to. So it’s a really—what’s the word I’m looking for?—It’s just really partial. It’s an ineffective window into what somebody else’s experience of your book was. And that’s what you want to get by reading a review, and you have the illusion that you have learned it. But actually, that’s not what you’re learning. You’re also learning how they want to seem in the world and how they want to position themselves and the status they want to get for themselves in the writing.

Madeline

Right, it’s their opportunity too.

Sheila

Yeah, their feeling about the book is kind of contaminated by all that. So you never really know how your book is felt inside them.

Madeline

It’s like this two way mirror.

Sheila

Yeah.

III. “The fundamental reality that we live and die can be seen as very funny.”

Madeline

In a Baffler interview, you talked about when you were in theater school in Toronto, how you wrote a lot of letters, and you didn’t even have a landline. I was wondering if you think that was a better and more pure time to write, or do you think the ease of connection has changed your writing?

Sheila

I mean, it’s really hard—God, when I look back on that time, I have a real fondness for it. But that’s also partly because I was so young. I was eighteen and nineteen in theatre school.

Madeline

Mm-hmm.

Sheila

You always kind of look back on when you were younger and have a fondness for it. What would it be like if it was the reverse? What would it be like if we had phones in the 90s, like, iPhones and so on, and then we lost them. Would we romanticize that time because it was the past and say that it was so much better? Oh, we were so connected with each other and now we’re all so alone. It’s so hard to tell whether that world was better because of its differences from now or because it was the past and you’re far away from it and you romanticize it. So there’s really no way of answering that question properly because you can’t, like in a science experiment, isolate the experience of not having a phone from the experience of being young and that youth being far away from you now.

Madeline

Yeah, absolutely. I am guilty of fetishizing the past when it wasn’t necessarily better. It just was different.

Pause.

Madeline

Do you feel like it’s important to write about the current moment? I always try to avoid any signifiers of modernity in my writing but, I don’t know, lately I've been feeling that it’s impossible or irresponsible or something not to engage with the times.

Sheila

It’s whatever that book needs. Different books are about different things and different books have a different quality or form or sound. So it’s just what that book wants to be. What does it want to be about? I just finished writing a book [The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea] which I just handed in to my editors—

Madeline makes an excited noise.

Sheila

There are no cell phones. They’re somewhere in the 20th century. So the book gave me that world and those rules.

Madeline

Right, right, right. But do you think that you chose to write in that era to like, avoid the pitfalls of, um, the ease of communication?

Sheila

No, no, no, no. It’s just because that book was about 14 year old girls and it was inspired, I think, in part by having been 14 in a time before all this stuff. And it was also inspired by the books that I read as a girl, which would have been published in the 70s and the 50s and 40s. And so that cosmos was contained pre, you know, iPhone, internet, or whatever.

Madeline

Not to derail our whole conversation into AI, but you’ve written this story with a chatbot, According to Alice. A lot of writers react to AI like it’s this existential threat to their career. But I was wondering if your relationship with it has changed since that story and its advancement into the mainstream?

Sheila

That was part of this book I’ve been working on since 2020, which keeps changing. I thought at one point that book was going to be my conversations with that chatbot entirely but, the more I work on it, the more those conversations fall away. I’ve become less interested in them. And not only my conversations with Alice, but other people’s conversations with her. I’m really interested in AI. I think it’s incredible. One of the most incredible things humans have ever created in the history of creation. It’s this mind that we can talk to in our own language. It’s unbelievable and I’m deeply fascinated by it, but writing about it in the form of a novel is hard because it really does keep changing. We are at such an early stage with it. What you’re trying to do with a novel, I think, is say something eternal, say something that would make sense in a 100 years or even a 100 years ago.

Madeline

Mm-hmm.

Sheila

The tendency, when thinking about AI, is what would make sense today? And whatever you would say about it today is not going to make sense in a year, because the object that you’re talking about is going to have changed so much. I guess I just feel like I keep drawing back, in terms of what’s in the book, and it’s becoming less about the sound of this chatbot and more about the person that gave it to the main character, that introduced it to her, and their relationship with each other. The things that don’t disappear in time are the relationships among people, so at the moment the chatbot has become this totem in the book. It’s less the main character.

Madeline

Have you read The Maniac?

Sheila

I know the book you’re talking about. I haven’t read it.

Madeline

I keep thinking about that and what you’re saying in relation to the creation of the atom bomb, which obviously ended in devastation, but at the time was this fantastic scientific discovery.

Sheila

Yeah…

Madeline

People were exploring this new thing they had—quantum mechanics, nuclear power—without realizing the impact it was going to have on the world forever. And I feel that way about AI. We’re still in the new light of discovery but have no idea what’s going to happen…

Sheila

Many of the people who are working on AI most intensely do think it’s going to destroy the world. And there were people at the time of the nuclear bomb’s creation, who were working on the Manhattan Project, who also had those fears. I think many people think that AI is the atom bomb.

Madeline

But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just this, I don’t know, voice without a self.

Sheila

Hmm.

Madeline

I would be really curious to read your AI novel, Sheila. If anyone can do it and remain distinctly human, it’s you. Speaking of your very human voice: you’re often called a philosopher of modern experience—

Sheila

Wow.

Madeline

It’s true! But I also think you’re quite funny, in just the right places, dry and tactful, and I was wondering what your relationship is with humor in your work?

Sheila

Like you, I think it’s very important. I think that there’s a lot of truth that can only be expressed when you’re being funny, because the fundamental reality that we live and die can be seen as very funny. It’s absurd, right?

Madeline

Mm.

Sheila

You’re here. It’s the most important thing that could possibly be, your own existence to yourself, and then it ends. That’s a bit of a joke, how seriously we take it all, only to have it all be taken away from us and without there being any remains of our internal life, anywhere. You can look at it as sad, or as funny, and I think that’s mostly just dispositional. I’m happy to have the disposition that finds it funny and absurd, rather than heartbreaking and tragic and awful. And whatever your disposition is to it colors how you see everything else in the world because your attitude towards death is what’s fundamental.

Madeline

Right. Comedy is sometimes thought of as a lesser medium, like navigating harsh realities with humor, but I completely disagree.

Sheila

Yeah, I completely disagree. I also wonder why people don't take humor as seriously as the affect of seriousness.

Madeline

Um, I think Salinger once said that one's humor is like a limp: it’s rude to comment on it.

Sheila

That’s hilarious.

IV. “We needed another horse.”

Madeline

In your 2018 interview with The Paris Review you said that you were over the modernist thing of trying to push away the reader. I was wondering if you think fiction should be easy or if it should be challenging—to sort of exercise one’s mind? Can you exercise without realizing it?

Sheila

I wish you could exercise without realizing it. Maybe I’m exercising all the time and I just don’t realize it. No, I don't think there’s any should with fiction. I think every writer does whatever feels right to them. I believe that everyone’s doing their best when they’re writing a book and maybe what you want to do in that book requires a level of complication or difficulty or pushing away of the reader. Maybe what it requires is something a little more inviting or seemingly simple. I think it’s really one of the only places in life in which there’s no rules—the novel—like you can actually make it whatever you want or need it to be, or whatever that particular novel wants to be. I wouldn’t say, oh, it should be difficult. It should exercise the reader’s mind. It should be anything.

Madeline

Hmm.

Sheila

It has to be everything, actually.

Madeline

And you’ve proven that it can be. Everything you’ve written from orienting narrative around a coin toss [Motherhood] to an anti-plot [Pure Color], to alphabetizing your life [Alphabetical Diaries] feels like it’s evading a single formal style. It just gets to be such an exploration, you’ve never pigeonholed yourself. I was wondering if you’d always intended to do that? If it was a rebellion against something you learned in writing school or if you just want to be ever evolving?

Sheila makes a thinking noise.

Sheila

I never went to writing school, so it wasn't something that I learned, but it’s just what’s interesting to you every day. When you sit down and write, you’re just trying to do the thing that’s most interesting to you that day and the idea of finishing a book and then starting another book that’s exactly the same as the last one just feels like death. Why would you do that? I know a lot of people do that. I just don’t understand it. Maybe they feel like they’re tunneling deeper and deeper and deeper in one particular direction. And that’s where their pleasure in writing comes from. Or maybe there’s just a feeling like they’re afraid to do something wildly different because they don’t know how to do that other thing and then they’re going to be in public with it and it’s going to be bad and they’re going to look like a failure. They’re going to look like an amateur because obviously if you’re making every book different from the last one, you’re sort of reinventing yourself with every book, and there’s going to be a lot of potential failure, rather than if you’re just refining what you did in the last one, with every successive book. So maybe some people don’t want to look stupid in public.

Madeline

Are you scared of looking stupid in public?

Sheila laughs.

Sheila

Oh, it’s far too late for that.

Madeline

I have researched you extensively now, and can confidently say that you have never been caught in an embarrassing moment. Genuinely. You have a squeaky clean record. It is impressive.

Madeline sucks up some more.

Sheila

Thank you. That’s just because I live in Toronto, and so no one in America has seen my foibles. If you’re trying to impress people, then you can really fall. But if you’re not trying to impress people, then there’s nowhere to fall, you know?

Madeline

You might have achieved a level of freedom that I have only ever dreamed of.

Sheila

You seem quite free.

Madeline

I am a prisoner of my own mind.

Sheila

Um…

Madeline

Sometimes I wish that I could pay a 22-year-old to scrub everything that’s ever existed of me off of the face of the planet.

Sheila

Mm-hmm.

Madeline

You write extensively about motherhood and authorship. So it seemed natural to me that you would write children’s books. I wanted to hear a little bit about that experience, like, what child were you writing for?

Sheila

Well, there are 2 children’s books and they both have really different origins. For the first one: Dave Eggers started a children’s book imprint at McSweeney’s a long time ago. I forget what year it was—2013 or something. He asked me to write a children’s book for them. So that was a commission that was really, really hard to do. I had like 60 versions. I kept trying to write them, and they were short. It was a picture book, so I could write 60 versions of completely different books, but they were all bad. I had this girlfriend for a summer and we broke up, but we went out one night and she was complaining about the current relationship she was in and—oh, no, no, she was complaining because no one wanted to be with her and she was single. And I went home and I just wrote this short story which became [We Need a Horse] with her in mind as the audience, sort of saying that there was nothing wrong with her. There was this horse in the story that wished it was a sheep. But we needed another horse and that’s what made the horse valuable. Obviously she was the horse.

Madeline

The child you had in mind was your adult friend.

Sheila

Yeah. She’s somebody that I loved so it was easy. Then the second one, A Garden of Creatures, I wrote more recently and I think it was probably written for myself. I wrote it on my phone, standing at the bus stop one day. It was after my father had died and it just came out of me. It was to comfort myself about death and his death. I sent it to a friend of mine, Esme Shapiro, who’s an illustrator who writes children’s books, and I said, do you think this is a children’s book? And if she’d said, no, that would have been the end of it. It would have just stayed in my phone, but she said yes, and her grandfather had just died and she wanted to illustrate it, so it became a book.

Madeline mentions she knows Esme tangentially.

Madeline

I somewhat recently got sober and I’ve been thinking a lot about higher powers and guiding forces and this idea of God and you speculated to your chatbot that God might exist and you grew up Jewish and I was wondering if you feel like you have a higher power? Does Sheila Heti pray?

Sheila

I don’t pray. I always remind myself, oh, you should pray. There's this thing called prayer. You should try that. And then I forget, you know?

Madeline

Mm-hmm.

Sheila

It’s not natural to me. I think that art is probably the closest that I get to really feeling that mysterious other force in the universe that is beyond our comprehension and is a gift that sort of reminds you that your life itself is a gift. To me, the gift is the pleasure I take in writing and the surprise of what comes out when I sit down to write and the wonder that any book ever concludes itself and is cohesive and is a world. All that to me is just so otherworldly and full of the feelings of synchronicity and fate and mystery and wonder. If I have a connection to this other force, this other spiritual force in the universe, that is probably where I feel it most. In the realm of making art. It’s evidenced through art.

Madeline

Right.

Sheila

Then I remind myself, oh, you were given this [gift]. You were given this thing that actually is the solution to your bad feelings, and it’s not antidepressants and it’s not exercise and it’s not friends. It’s actually just writing. I remember that and then I start writing and then I feel connected to the universe again. It’s silly that I forget that that’s there for me.

Madeline

Absolutely. You ask Joan Didion: does it feel different to live when you’re not working on something. Clearly for you…it’s essential.

Sheila

Yeah, so why don’t I remember that and always be working on something? Well, I just don't.

Madeline

It’s funny how sometimes we’ll neglect the one thing that we need to feel better.

Sheila

I know. Maybe it's because when you start to put it in the language of work, that’s when you start neglecting it. You’re like, I don't want to work. I’m feeling lazy. And then you have to remind yourself, but it’s actually not work. It’s something else.

Madeline

Spiritual.

Sheila

A connection.