The Smutty Mystic

Reading Sheila Heti’s breakthrough novels, How Should a Person Be? (2012) and Motherhood (2018), I kept thinking that I was the only one who noticed how religious they are—Jewish, mostly, which is how she was raised, but Christian too, with some non-Western source material thrown in. Once I’d Googled the reviews, I realized I was right and wrong. With a few exceptions, she has not been pigeonholed as a Jewish writer or, worse, the author of works on spirituality. Instead, she’s seen by mainstream critics as a feminist, which she is; as avant-garde, which I suppose she is (although I never quite know what that means); and as a writer of autofiction, which she isn’t.

I don’t deny that some of her work has autobiographical content. How Should a Person Be? hews closely to Heti’s coming-of-age as a writer in a small circle of young artists in Toronto, and the narrator of Motherhood is a successful writer and childless divorcée approaching 40, as Heti was when she wrote the book. Her new novel, Pure Colour, has one important element drawn from life, the death of her father. Heti plunders her experiences and emotions and sexuality for material, but what novelist doesn’t, to a greater or lesser extent? In Heti’s hands, her story is a means to an end that most so-called autofiction writers—indeed, most writers of anything perceived as metafictional—would shy away from. She is doing more than blurring the boundary between the real and the made-up. Heti uses the details of her life to do theology.

Her novels have the digressive quality of essays, and they take on such, she follows her fascination with the sacred into domains so surreal that we have to abandon any notion that she’s merely some sort of postmodern diarist. We have to pay Heti the courtesy of taking her question literally. She really wants to know: