Sheila Heti sits down with Sunny Yudkoff and ND host John Plotz to discuss her incredibly varied oeuvre. She does it all: stories, novels, alphabetized diary entries as well as a series of dialogues in the New Yorker with an AI named Alice.
Drawing on her background in Jewish Studies, Sunny prompts Sheila to unpack the implicit and explicit theology of her recent Pure Color (Sheila admits she “spent a lot of time thinking about …what God’s pronouns are going to be” )–as well as the protagonist’s temporary transformation into a leaf. The three also explore how life and lifelikeness shape How Should a Person Be. Sheila explains why “auto-fiction” strikes her as a “bad category” and “a lazy way of thinking about what the author is doing formally” since “the history of literature is authors melding their imagination with their lived experience.”
Sheila’s response to the signature question was both textual and hilarious. A true writer’s weirdness!
Mentioned in this Episode:
By Sheila Heti:
Pure Colour
How Should a Person Be?
Alphabetical Diaries
Ticknor
We Need a Horse (children’s book)
The Chairs are Where the People Go (with Misha Glouberman)
Also mentioned:
Oulipo Group
Autofiction: e.g. Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard
Craig Seligman, Sontag and Kael
George Eliot, Middlemarch
Clarice Lispector (e.g. The Hour of the Star)
Kenneth Goldsmith Soliloquy
Willa Cather , The Professor’s House ( overlap of reality and recollection: “When I look into the Æneid now, I can always see two pictures: the one on the page, and another behind that: blue and purple rocks and yellow-green piñons with flat tops, little clustered houses clinging together for protection, a rude tower rising in their midst, rising strong, with calmness and courage–behind it a dark grotto, in its depths a crystal spring.”)
William Steig, Sylvester and The Magic Pebble.
Listen and Read:
Audio: Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
Transcript: 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW) – Novel Dialogue
- 7.2 You Write Because You Want to Feel Free: Katie Kitamura and Alexander Manshel (SW)
- 7.1 Etherized: Anne Enright in Conversation with Paige Reynolds (JP)
- 6.6 Overtaken by Awe: Sheila Heti speaks with Sunny Yudkoff
- 6.5 Attention is Love: A Discussion with Lauren Groff and Laura McGrath (SW)
- 6.4 “We All Relate to Each Other’s Dystopias”