Skirting around the parent trap

Memoir, fiction, no matter, Sheila Heti's Motherhood bristles with brutal, assured honesty.

Sheila Heti’s new book is neither a novel nor a memoir – but a strange hybrid of both Pic: Getty

MEMOIR/FICTION: Motherhood, By Sheila Heti, Harvill Secker, €19.55

The Canadian author of seven books, Sheila Heti’s name was made by How Should a Person Be?, her 2012 meditation on life, art and personal ambition. That book garnered praise for its form-flouting style and so it abides with Motherhood. Here, we have another diarised outpouring, a navel gaze, that sees the narrator interrogate a single, urgent dilemma: to become a mother or not to ...