Motherhood
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3.3 • 21 Ratings
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
A daring, funny, and poignant novel about the desire and duty to procreate, by one of our most brilliant and original writers.
Motherhood treats one of the most consequential decisions of early adulthood—whether or not to have children—with the intelligence, wit and originality that have won Sheila Heti international acclaim, and which led her previous work, How Should a Person Be?, to be called "one of the most talked-about books of the year" (TIME magazine).
Having reached an age when most of her peers are asking themselves when they will become mothers, Heti's narrator considers, with the same urgency, whether she will do so at all. Over the course of several years, under the influence of her partner, body, family, friends, mysticism and chance, she struggles to make a moral and meaningful choice.
In a compellingly direct mode that straddles the forms of the novel and the essay, Motherhood raises radical and essential questions about womanhood, parenthood, and how—and for whom—to live.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With this autobiographical novel, Sheila Heti opens a trapdoor into her brain as she wrestles with her desire to not have children. Her thoughts loop, zigzag, and backtrack, tangibly demonstrating how difficult it is for a woman to forge a distinct path that’s not the norm. The main character grapples with her thorny relationship with her mother and her fiery, challenging, and fulfilling love story. She reflects on the tension between the creative life and the slog of parenting, decrying the patriarchal ideas that primarily value women as portals for bringing new people into the world. Motherhood is a special, stunningly written book that will spark conversations among women and men, no matter where their paths have taken them.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The subject of the new novel from Heti (How Should a Person Be?) is neither birth nor child-rearing, but the question of whether to want a child, which the unnamed narrator calls "the greatest secret I keep from myself." To find the answer, she practices techniques cribbed from the I Ching, consults a psychic and Tarot cards, contemplates her mother's experiences as a woman, counts her periods, and considers freezing her eggs. In the meantime, she and her partner, Miles, are going through a rough patch, only partly due to her indecision, which is exacerbated by visits with her friends (all of whom seem to have newborn babies), recurrent and bittersweet fantasies of raising a family, and her knowledge that she is reaching the end of the window when maternity is possible. A book of sex (the real, unsensational kind), mood swings, and deep feminist thought, this volume is essentially a chronicle of vacillating ruminations on this big question. Although readers shouldn't go in expecting clean-cut epiphanies, this lively, exhilaratingly smart, and deliberately, appropriately frustrating affair asks difficult questions about women's responsibilities and desires, and society's expectations.
