"Sheila Heti is one of the great new contributors to contemporary letters. Her long and short fiction and literary interviews are of such a high quality, they quickly place her in that exalted category of so-called writer's writers. Her debut novel, Ticknor, published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, was an underground cult hit that mixed classic touches with fragrant discord. Her story collection, The Middle Stories, was equally amazing. Her narratives' optimistic pessimism resonates in the direction of the fanciful and abject Swiss genius Robert Walser. Ms. Heti's special brand of gloom is tinged with wonder, high humour, wounds and lyric mischief. Her fiction has been aptly described as "a satisfying puzzle... her prose is the journey and the destination." It's also self-reflexive, comprised of equal measures genuine pain, comic pain and ambiguous, giddy troubles. Ms. Heti is a keen hair-splitter, a conceptual artist residing inside a fiction writer who slices up large, weighty conundrums into curious, glistening slivers of thought. She is that rare entity, a true original."
- Benjamin Weissman, curator of the New American Writing series at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.
Los Angeles Review of Books podcast interview with Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman about The Chairs Are Where the Peole Go. Here.
Paper Trails interview with Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman about The Chairs Are Where the Peole Go. Audio here.
CBC Interview with Bill Richardson for his 2006 series, Five Times Table. ...click to listen
The Hammer Museum "New American Writing" talk; a podcast of a lecture and reading I gave in Los Angeles in 2010. ...click to listen
The National Post features Sheila Heti and Misha Glouberman talking to each other about their book, The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Part 1 talks about its develpment; Part 2 talks about its strange relationship to Ticknor.
"I like everything about playwriting except the fact that it ends up being a play. " - interview by Amelia Shonbeck, Maisonneuve
Radio interview with Shelagh Rogers about How Should a Person Be? on CBC's The Next Chapter. Begins streaming at 26:15.
"Both Henry Miller and Heidi Montag are pretty playful about persona – like that totally wasn’t Henry Miller, and I’m sure that totally isn’t Heidi Montag; obviously they’ve both used life as an artistic medium – and their selves as characters in it." - interview about How Should a Person Be? by Lee Henderson
"When I was younger, I always really wanted to abstract life. More and more as I get older I realize that this abstraction is totally devoid of life. It's missing something true about life. Every situation is different from every other." The Harvard Advocate
"The thing I was most interested in was not being alone in my room. I really wanted to be in the world as much as possible, and to try to find some way of writing that wouldn’t entail sitting in my apartment for years. I didn’t want another five years of neurotically moving back and forth between art and life – feeling when I was out that I should be home writing, or while I was home writing, wishing I was out. So I wrote this book." - interview about How Should a Person Be? by Brian Joseph Davis, Joyland
"Okay so if I put all that stuff online, so the interactive stuff that I was thinking of was... people could take all that extra material and edit together a new version of the book, because I’d be happy to see a better version of this book that I wrote, if that’s possible, I don’t know if that is possible, I don’t mean that... " - interview by Dan Epstein, The Newspaper at U of T
"I used to want to be an actress; I think that was my first dream. But I just wasn't so good at it. So I think it's interesting when you have to do the art that you really want to do through the art that you can do." - interview by Alex Snukal, Hart House Review
"[Margaux and I] both took that risk on very consciously, and because we were conscious all the way through, it ended up not destroying the friendship. It was important to me not to hurt her. Also, if I had hurt her, the book would’ve failed. It wouldn’t have been a book I could publish. So it’s very interesting to decide how to be accountable to the people around you. It was more complicated than just writing a story. '" - interview by Chandler Levack, Eye Weekly
"You don’t want to always be eliminating the failure [in your writing]. Often the thing that sticks in your mind about something is how it’s bad, which strangely makes it good. If you take away all the bad, and you just have the good, then you end up with nothing." - interview by Spencer Gordon, Puritan Magazine
"Definitely I wanted to fix myself in a million ways while I was writing it, and that’s what I hoped the writing of it would do; provoke a catharsis and a change in me and a way of moving beyond the question of the title. Which it did. I like a lot of aspects self-help books; I like the direct address to the reader, which feels very immediate, and that the narrator of a self-help book is not a fictional character but the author, and most of all, the injunction that you have to take what you learned and enact it in the world. The book doesn’t end when you finish reading it. That’s when it begins; when you begin to live differently as a result of having read it." - interview by Michael Hingston, Too Many Books in the Kitchen
Interview by Bill Richardson (CBC radio) ...click to listen
Profile by Andrea Curtis, CBC.ca
Profile by Damian Rogers, Eye Weekly
Profile by Micah Toub, University of Toronto magazine
Profile by Kevin Connolly, Eye Weekly
Profile by Harry Vandervlist, FFWD
Profile in Saturday Night