Pure Colour and Presence
In a fragmented world, what remains? Presence, Sheila Heti’s newest novel insists, in all its broken and halfhearted and odd forms. Being present, however halfheartedly, to people and to texts is one balm for this condition.
Sheila Heti
How We Read Autofiction
Autobiography is straightforward in a way that autofiction is not: in this case, the prefix “auto,” or self, pairs easily with the suffix “biography,” or life story. An autobiography tells the self’s life story. But what does it mean to tell a fiction of the self?
Publishing | Reading | Writing
What’s Self-Love Got to Do with It?
Two years ago a generous woman handed me a spare key to the private office where she conducts her psychotherapy practice. I’ve since spent most weekends and some Jewish holy days, hours both glorious and mundane, in this Greenwich Village brownstone where I read and write and fret and nap on a red couch. I…
The Family You Choose
The Family You Choose In college my housemates and I once drew a social map of our class. This is similar. A web, not a tree. I’ve always been prone to intense friendships. Not best friendships, necessarily, or not in the one-and-only sense. I’m of the Mindy Kaling school on that point: “best friend” is…