On Culture, Psychics, and Making Meaning: An Interview with Sheila Heti
By Carolyn Tung (CMC '24)
Image Source: The Guardian
Sheila Heti is a writer, playwright, and critic. She was named a member of "The New Vanguard" by the New York Times, a writer "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Pure Colour is her tenth book, a recently published novel that reimagines grief and love through the story of a young woman living in the first creation draft of the world, who has lost her father and subsequently transforms into a leaf. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
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You’re a playwright, a children’s book author, and the founder of an outside-the-box lecture series. How do you engage with a variety of different genres in your work? How have theater, drama, and playwriting influenced your writing and writing process?
Part of it was the first books that I really loved reading when I was thinking that maybe I’d want to be a writer. When I was a teenager, I began reading plays very seriously, like Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, and Edward Albee. Something about the fact that they were mostly dialogue and had very minimal stage direction influenced how I then continued to write. The fact that I don’t use much description comes from these years of reading plays. That I like to focus on what people say—or, in the cases of my books, on what people think, rather than the action that happens between people—was also probably influenced by these beginnings I had in playwriting. I also participated in a lot of theater when I was younger and liked working with other people, so a large part of my process involves other artists; showing them my work, talking to them, making art out of my relationships, that all has to do with missing the collaborative, social aspect of theater.
Pure Colour can be so abstract at times, and comments on the spectacle of humanity and being alive. It’s a book with a wide wingspan, and it is an existential meditation on life, loss, and love in the form of photosynthesis, of something cellular and biological and connected to the energy and rhythm of the earth. In contrast, your past projects touched on the self and motherhood, all very individual and person-centered. What did you most want to express when writing Pure Colour? What shifted within you at this time?
For a very long time, I was interested in the psychology of the individual. Maybe I got to the end of that curiosity, and with Pure Colour, I became interested in how the human fits into the cosmos and what else there is—what other relationships are there in the world besides our relationships with other people. I had been extremely focused on what happens between people and what happens within a person, and had blocked out the fact that there was a lot more going on on earth--plants and everything that’s formed a background to our lives but felt to me, during the years when I was writing Pure Colour, like not the background but the foreground.
You’ve commented a lot on how you feel outside of culture these days. Does that have to do with the end to your curiosity about things that are more focused on the self?
Frankly, I think everyone probably feels a little outside of culture after the last few years because there wasn’t really culture in the same way. Culture involves being together and making things and doing things together and we’re all just separate from each other, so culture receded from everyone. But part of it is just getting older and you feel like the times belong to people who are younger than you. It becomes very different to be alive, and it’s interesting. I hadn’t known that would happen. 20-year-olds are the ones who are most comfortable with the contemporary ways of communicating, and you feel like you’re sort of still holding onto the ways you’ve learned to be in the past that don’t feel quite as relevant anymore. There’s no real way of keeping up because you were born and raised in a different time and it involves a complete re-architecting of your inner self to keep pace with the way technology changes human relations.
You mentioned that a lot of what 20-year-olds do is shape culture. How do you think that’s influencing the state of fiction today?
The problem is, a lot of 20-year-olds don’t publish books. I don’t really know what 20-year-olds are writing. I wish I knew. I think people that teach know that. On the other hand, I think for writers it takes five or 10 years to find your own form, so probably a lot of 20-year-olds are still imitating and haven’t yet been working on their own writing long enough to find their own form. So I’ll be curious to know what the 20-year-olds are publishing in five or 10 years. That’s when everything will be revealed. You just have to go through trying forms out and seeing how they don’t quite fit with your own sensibility or your own sense of the world, and then look at the very difficult process of figuring out how to write in a way that does express everything you know about the world. That takes a lot of time.
What is your relationship with writing and healing?
I don’t really think about the word “healing.” It’s a little fuzzy for me, a little sentimental perhaps. I don’t really think about that word that much. But I do think writing is a way for making meaning and filling in the gaps of experience with your own interpretations. The books I’ve been most drawn to aren’t books that are healing but books that throw me off, that break things apart and break things up and disturb me. I don’t think I go to literature to be healed, exactly, and I don’t think that’s the reason I write, either.
How much of this book carried the intention to surprise or to provoke? Was that accidental, something that naturally unfolded in the writing process?
I think it naturally unfolded, because it surprised me when I was writing it much more than any other book. It came to me sequentially. When I started the book, I didn't know that a year and a half or two years into the book, I would be writing passages within a leaf. There's a lot that I didn't foresee, so I was surprised quite a bit. I actually had a conversation with this psychic who a friend set me up with and she was talking about the book as I was writing it. She was like, “It's three jewels, it's three parts, and each part is very different from each other part, and it gets consecutively stranger.” She said, “That's what they’re supposed to be and that's okay.” And that gave me the confidence to stick with it and not question it. I was like, if this random woman has the ability to see the truth and has predicted this book I'm writing without knowing anything about it, then I'm on the right track.
How did your relationship with religion, philosophy, and spirituality influence the writing of Pure Colour, if at all?
Those are all things that I think about all the time. I think about our place in the universe and why we're here and what we're doing here and why we don't know what we're doing here and how strange that is. If we don’t know, are we supposed to find out? How can there be a “supposed to” in an indifferent universe?
Were there other instances or experiences like consulting a psychic that happened when you were writing Pure Colour, or was that really just a rare circumstance?
There were all sorts of strange coincidences and things that felt like signs. It kind of happens when you write a book that you become a little bit schizophrenic or, like, you’re on mushrooms, where everything starts to seem really meaningful and you start seeing patterns and signs everywhere. I felt like this when I was falling in love with my boyfriend, like everything has this heightened reality and sense of destiny and pattern. When that starts happening when you're working on a book, it's just such a great feeling. You're constantly looking for that, because if you can detect those kinds of things that you can meaningfully synthesize, that just helps you make decisions in this process that is all about making decisions that you hope will be the right ones when you’re a year or two along.
Is that how your writing process usually works?
No, this was really different in that way. Usually I'm a lot more in my head about what I'm doing and I feel like it feels less intuitive. There's more of a map or I'm more deliberately creating a map, and I would try to keep up with what was happening throughout the page.
What drew you to begin the book with the form of a creation myth, something grounded in fable and almost biblical language?
You know, you start writing things. You’re just kind of playing, and then you look back at what you wrote and you think, “I like this passage and I like this passage and I like this page.” You sort of build up all the things that you like reading that you've already written, so it's more like you try lots of things and you're playing around. And then some things you want to play with because they look good on the page or they sound good on the page or sound good in your head. I don't think it was the deliberate thought: “I want to write about a creation myth.” It's more that after I'd written that for whatever reason, I thought it sounded good and wanted to keep on with it.
Do you think there are aspects of your writing style that will never leave you, that are integral to your writing?
My sense of rhythm, the way a sentence sounds good to my ear—which is the kind of thing you look at when you're editing. I think that's really deep down in myself, the shape of the sentence. It’s really hard to imagine that changing because it feels intertwined with my identity.
Do you have plans set for any of your future projects yet, or will you be taking this time to relax?
I don't really like relaxing—I don't really relax in that way. Working is a pleasure and I don't ever feel like I want to take time off from it, but sometimes I have to because I have nothing that I want to specifically write or work on, or I don't have any thoughts in my head. But I'd always rather be working.
As for the next project, I just started thinking about it during the last six months when the book was done and I was doing some publicity stuff. The six months before your book comes out, you just have this sense of waiting; as much as you don't want to feel that way, you're just waiting for that to happen so then you can move on. It's probably like the way that a pregnant woman feels like, okay, I'm just pregnant right now. Until the baby comes, you want to focus on other things and you do focus on other things, but you aren't completely there. You're waiting for this big life change, when the next phase of your life is going to start. But with publishing a book there's also dread, and maybe there's dread when you're pregnant too—I don’t know. You just feel like: oh, God, what's going to happen, or is anyone going to like the book?
You’ve been writing for years. What did you most want to experiment with in terms of your writing style in Pure Colour?
Honestly, I wasn't really thinking of it that way. It's more that the book came to me in different phases. I was just trying to make it work as a book and all along asking myself: is this a book, could this be a book? If I put all these things together, would it sound like a book or feel like a book? It wasn't so much an experiment. It was more the things that came to me were so out there. And I was hoping that I could make sense out of them.
Part of it was the first books that I really loved reading when I was thinking that maybe I’d want to be a writer. When I was a teenager, I began reading plays very seriously, like Harold Pinter, Eugène Ionesco, and Edward Albee. Something about the fact that they were mostly dialogue and had very minimal stage direction influenced how I then continued to write. The fact that I don’t use much description comes from these years of reading plays. That I like to focus on what people say—or, in the cases of my books, on what people think, rather than the action that happens between people—was also probably influenced by these beginnings I had in playwriting. I also participated in a lot of theater when I was younger and liked working with other people, so a large part of my process involves other artists; showing them my work, talking to them, making art out of my relationships, that all has to do with missing the collaborative, social aspect of theater.
Pure Colour can be so abstract at times, and comments on the spectacle of humanity and being alive. It’s a book with a wide wingspan, and it is an existential meditation on life, loss, and love in the form of photosynthesis, of something cellular and biological and connected to the energy and rhythm of the earth. In contrast, your past projects touched on the self and motherhood, all very individual and person-centered. What did you most want to express when writing Pure Colour? What shifted within you at this time?
For a very long time, I was interested in the psychology of the individual. Maybe I got to the end of that curiosity, and with Pure Colour, I became interested in how the human fits into the cosmos and what else there is—what other relationships are there in the world besides our relationships with other people. I had been extremely focused on what happens between people and what happens within a person, and had blocked out the fact that there was a lot more going on on earth--plants and everything that’s formed a background to our lives but felt to me, during the years when I was writing Pure Colour, like not the background but the foreground.
You’ve commented a lot on how you feel outside of culture these days. Does that have to do with the end to your curiosity about things that are more focused on the self?
Frankly, I think everyone probably feels a little outside of culture after the last few years because there wasn’t really culture in the same way. Culture involves being together and making things and doing things together and we’re all just separate from each other, so culture receded from everyone. But part of it is just getting older and you feel like the times belong to people who are younger than you. It becomes very different to be alive, and it’s interesting. I hadn’t known that would happen. 20-year-olds are the ones who are most comfortable with the contemporary ways of communicating, and you feel like you’re sort of still holding onto the ways you’ve learned to be in the past that don’t feel quite as relevant anymore. There’s no real way of keeping up because you were born and raised in a different time and it involves a complete re-architecting of your inner self to keep pace with the way technology changes human relations.
You mentioned that a lot of what 20-year-olds do is shape culture. How do you think that’s influencing the state of fiction today?
The problem is, a lot of 20-year-olds don’t publish books. I don’t really know what 20-year-olds are writing. I wish I knew. I think people that teach know that. On the other hand, I think for writers it takes five or 10 years to find your own form, so probably a lot of 20-year-olds are still imitating and haven’t yet been working on their own writing long enough to find their own form. So I’ll be curious to know what the 20-year-olds are publishing in five or 10 years. That’s when everything will be revealed. You just have to go through trying forms out and seeing how they don’t quite fit with your own sensibility or your own sense of the world, and then look at the very difficult process of figuring out how to write in a way that does express everything you know about the world. That takes a lot of time.
What is your relationship with writing and healing?
I don’t really think about the word “healing.” It’s a little fuzzy for me, a little sentimental perhaps. I don’t really think about that word that much. But I do think writing is a way for making meaning and filling in the gaps of experience with your own interpretations. The books I’ve been most drawn to aren’t books that are healing but books that throw me off, that break things apart and break things up and disturb me. I don’t think I go to literature to be healed, exactly, and I don’t think that’s the reason I write, either.
How much of this book carried the intention to surprise or to provoke? Was that accidental, something that naturally unfolded in the writing process?
I think it naturally unfolded, because it surprised me when I was writing it much more than any other book. It came to me sequentially. When I started the book, I didn't know that a year and a half or two years into the book, I would be writing passages within a leaf. There's a lot that I didn't foresee, so I was surprised quite a bit. I actually had a conversation with this psychic who a friend set me up with and she was talking about the book as I was writing it. She was like, “It's three jewels, it's three parts, and each part is very different from each other part, and it gets consecutively stranger.” She said, “That's what they’re supposed to be and that's okay.” And that gave me the confidence to stick with it and not question it. I was like, if this random woman has the ability to see the truth and has predicted this book I'm writing without knowing anything about it, then I'm on the right track.
How did your relationship with religion, philosophy, and spirituality influence the writing of Pure Colour, if at all?
Those are all things that I think about all the time. I think about our place in the universe and why we're here and what we're doing here and why we don't know what we're doing here and how strange that is. If we don’t know, are we supposed to find out? How can there be a “supposed to” in an indifferent universe?
Were there other instances or experiences like consulting a psychic that happened when you were writing Pure Colour, or was that really just a rare circumstance?
There were all sorts of strange coincidences and things that felt like signs. It kind of happens when you write a book that you become a little bit schizophrenic or, like, you’re on mushrooms, where everything starts to seem really meaningful and you start seeing patterns and signs everywhere. I felt like this when I was falling in love with my boyfriend, like everything has this heightened reality and sense of destiny and pattern. When that starts happening when you're working on a book, it's just such a great feeling. You're constantly looking for that, because if you can detect those kinds of things that you can meaningfully synthesize, that just helps you make decisions in this process that is all about making decisions that you hope will be the right ones when you’re a year or two along.
Is that how your writing process usually works?
No, this was really different in that way. Usually I'm a lot more in my head about what I'm doing and I feel like it feels less intuitive. There's more of a map or I'm more deliberately creating a map, and I would try to keep up with what was happening throughout the page.
What drew you to begin the book with the form of a creation myth, something grounded in fable and almost biblical language?
You know, you start writing things. You’re just kind of playing, and then you look back at what you wrote and you think, “I like this passage and I like this passage and I like this page.” You sort of build up all the things that you like reading that you've already written, so it's more like you try lots of things and you're playing around. And then some things you want to play with because they look good on the page or they sound good on the page or sound good in your head. I don't think it was the deliberate thought: “I want to write about a creation myth.” It's more that after I'd written that for whatever reason, I thought it sounded good and wanted to keep on with it.
Do you think there are aspects of your writing style that will never leave you, that are integral to your writing?
My sense of rhythm, the way a sentence sounds good to my ear—which is the kind of thing you look at when you're editing. I think that's really deep down in myself, the shape of the sentence. It’s really hard to imagine that changing because it feels intertwined with my identity.
Do you have plans set for any of your future projects yet, or will you be taking this time to relax?
I don't really like relaxing—I don't really relax in that way. Working is a pleasure and I don't ever feel like I want to take time off from it, but sometimes I have to because I have nothing that I want to specifically write or work on, or I don't have any thoughts in my head. But I'd always rather be working.
As for the next project, I just started thinking about it during the last six months when the book was done and I was doing some publicity stuff. The six months before your book comes out, you just have this sense of waiting; as much as you don't want to feel that way, you're just waiting for that to happen so then you can move on. It's probably like the way that a pregnant woman feels like, okay, I'm just pregnant right now. Until the baby comes, you want to focus on other things and you do focus on other things, but you aren't completely there. You're waiting for this big life change, when the next phase of your life is going to start. But with publishing a book there's also dread, and maybe there's dread when you're pregnant too—I don’t know. You just feel like: oh, God, what's going to happen, or is anyone going to like the book?
You’ve been writing for years. What did you most want to experiment with in terms of your writing style in Pure Colour?
Honestly, I wasn't really thinking of it that way. It's more that the book came to me in different phases. I was just trying to make it work as a book and all along asking myself: is this a book, could this be a book? If I put all these things together, would it sound like a book or feel like a book? It wasn't so much an experiment. It was more the things that came to me were so out there. And I was hoping that I could make sense out of them.