Motherhood by Sheila Heti: book review and autofiction thoughts
I'm starting to realize there's two different things that end up being called "autofiction." There are classically shaped novels with fully drawn worlds and character arcs, where, after arriving at the end of the book and reading the author bio, you realize there might have been more truth in the fiction than originally appeared. This often happens, primarily, to young women who must, of course, be the young women they write about. But then there's an entirely different phenomenon, I'm coming to see, where autofiction is a stylistic framework, an entirely alien approach to what novel writing can be. The experience of stumbling into this has unsurprisingly come through two of the modern version of the movement's most celebrated figures—Sheila Heti and Ben Lerner.
And this version of autofiction, while sharing the fact that it's shelved in the fiction section of the bookstore and have protagonists that resemble the authors, do not take typical novelistic shape. Instead, they feel like books created to think through a particular topic or issue pressing on the author's mind. They're less interested in creating a world than creating a particular space to workshop a particular thought for the length of a novel. In Lerner's case with his most recent, Transcription, he comes at a few ideas all related to our relationship with technology. In Heti's, with this book, she's examining motherhood—yes, the pressing question as to whether one should have children but also exploring her relationship with her mother and her mother's with her mother and the generational trauma that looms over family ties. In both cases, I felt like the books really could've boiled down to an essay. Or, maybe, an essay collection. While I'm not litigating the relationship between truth and fiction here, the books read the nonfiction. Lerner's read as in-scene essays with the point more heavily in mind than prose style or character development or a sense of place and social context whereas Heti's feel like fragmented diary entires over the years of someone ruminating on a singular question. Someone, really, who seems to know their stance from the outset. What's funny is that Heti's book entirely made of sentences from her diaries rearranged alphabetically reads much more effortlessly as fiction because it encompasses a full and layered world. It's not setting out with a one-track-mind, and therefore it feels like you're experiencing a fully realized journey and the many stories that unfold within it.
I feel like Motherhood locates the exact problem with the binary categorization of literature. That anything that has an ounce of not being explicitly true is fictional and therefore must be shelved with all the other novels regardless of what it feels like. If you go into Motherhood looking for a novel about a woman trying to decide whether to have a child, you will be disappointed. This is a series of thought loops and fragments that chart the numerous mental rabbit holes one goes down when trying to make the biggest decision of her life and how society will make you doubt yourself even when you've known what you wanted all along. The book very accurately mimics life, but there's also a reason that books are not transcriptions of life or that some things that happen in life just don't work in books. Because life is tedious and repetitive and often boring and can be totally infuriating. And this book is too at times. There are gems, for sure, but there's also a lot of thinking will this ever be over this is the fifth time we've discussed this. At other times, I was deeply moved. I took photos of passages. I thought about my relationship with my own mother and how we're all just trying our best. I appreciated Heti's point that the decision to not have children doesn't feel like a decision because the opposite choice is constantly possible and a looming threat until menopause. She's good at dissecting the cultural constructs. I found it fascinating when she spoke about how, in a way, her boyfriend not wanting to have a child with her was enabling her true wish around what to do with her life, but at the same time, it was offensive and troubling that he did not want to have a child with her.
It's just that Motherhood reads like nonfiction but without the topical organization of an essay collection. I think I would've received this book, as well as Transcription, better if I hadn't gotten them out of the fiction section. If they got their own space as hybrid work. I don't care if they're true or not. There's simply a tonal divide between these works and a novel. If I'd picked them up as augmented versions of reality not interested in the traditional scaffolding of a novel, I don't know how they would've felt to me. Because I found myself, often, wishing I was reading a more traditionally shaped novel. That this was failing to scratch the itch that I look to wrangle with fiction. And that's not a failing of Heti's. She's doing something entirely different. While that doesn't diminish that the book can be extremely repetitive and tedious, it does provide context to this feeling that the reading experience didn't quite match up to what I wanted. I found Alphabetical Diaries to be a somewhat transcendent experimentation with form. Motherhood, while being a fascinating piece of thought, simply fell flatter.
Overall: 3.5
mentioned books:
transcription by ben lerner review
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