I remember where I was when I wrote that story, 'Mermaid in a Jar.' I was at a boyfriend's, and he was the only boy I ever dated who was rich, and his parents had a ski chalet, and I just didn't know how to break up with him, so I decided I would be celibate.
Sheila Heti
For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.
When you're writing, I think a big part of writing comes out of an attempt to understand yourself. You're dealing with emotions and thoughts that are native to you. So that probably winds up in your characters.
In 'Sweet Days of Discipline,' the narrator, years after graduating, fortuitously encounters her old friend Frederique at a movie theatre. Frederique invites her home.
I believe there's a platonic ideal for every book that is written, like there's the perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether, and my job is to find what that book is through my editing.
Only in our failures are we absolutely alone. Only in the pursuit of failure can a person really be free. Losers may be the avant garde of the modern age.
I just always felt whole when I was writing. I felt this kind of beautiful privacy that I never felt in any other way. I feel like there's this great fullness to being alone, and writing is a really vivid way and a really magical way of being alone.
Usually, you don't have commitment promises in a friendship. Usually, it just grows.
It took me five or six years to write 'How Should a Person Be?' and there were many times when I felt discouraged.
Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!
Laurie Simmons began showing her photographs in New York in the late '70s: black-and-white and then candy-colored scenarios with plastic dolls in 1950s-style domestic interiors.
Tove Jansson was the most successful Finnish illustrator and writer of children's books of her day, and she was the most widely read Finn abroad. She began her life as an artist early - she had her first drawing published at fifteen.
One good thing about being a woman is we haven't too many examples yet of what a genius looks like.
Sometimes you can't write a novel for weeks and weeks, but it's good for your self-esteem to work on something else.
Trying to live the image of the life which you have in your head... it's really hard not to do that, but I do think maybe it's cheating.
I see friends of mine who have kids and continue to do their art. It's deeply impressive. I can't even fit an Amazon return into the day. It's been sitting on my desk for two weeks.
I feel like every single time I've published a book, there's some little light in me that goes out. I've seen the way people can misunderstand or misinterpret things, if not maliciously, then without a lot of sensitivity.
I find that when I'm in a relationship, I'm just so 'in it,' you couldn't even call it an art; it's such embroilment. With a friendship, you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more.
Writing plays, I've always felt a little like I'm guessing - less sure of what's good and what's not good. I think that's because it's not a complete work of art.
The main problem I've always had with fashion media is that women are encouraged to copy other women.
To add something to the world should be the question, not not adding something to the world.
Many of the traits in my characters are exaggerations of things I see in myself. But in 'How Should a Person Be?' I wasn't trying to write about myself so much as a combination of myself and these women I was seeing in our culture.
Today, I defined 'sentimental' to myself as a feeling about the idea of a feeling.
Nonfiction, to me, feels like an argument, whereas a novel is like a series of questions.
'The Chairs are Where the People Go' was told to me by my friend Misha Glouberman; I typed as he talked. In 'How Should a Person Be?' the transcribed dialogues between me and my friends help form the structure of the book.
I saw what was wonderful about human companionship. Before that, I was quite content to be alone, to be a solitary wandering person, and I thought I always would be. Love changed that.
I wished to have the time to put together a world view, but there was never enough time, and also, those who had it seemed to have had it from a very young age; they didn't begin at forty.
Just because you are alive does not mean you have to give life.
My feminism is just part of my being - a part of my understanding of the world.
There's something about a woman's life choices that invites commentary, whether it's been invited or not.
As a journalist, you don't tend to interview people with a view to becoming their friend. You can't expect that. It's not professional.
There is a kind of sadness in not wanting the things that give so many other people their life's meaning. There can be sadness at not living out a more universal story - the supposed life cycle.
Growing up, I never knew that Raffi turned down celebrity endorsements, TV shows, and specials and refused to make merchandise, but it makes sense given how I think about him: My memories are limited to his voice through the record player and the album covers I stared at.
I'm happy that I wrote 'How Should a Person Be?' and I wouldn't have written that exact book if we had just done the play. So much of the book is about the anxiety of failure - the failure of the play and the failure of the divorce and the failure of not feeling like a good person.
Women, post-menopause, go back to how they were before they started menstruating, and there's this great freedom in a woman's life when she reaches the end of that reproductive cycle, and that most women come into their own strength, the same strength they had as a girl.
I didn't wander into motherhood or nonmotherhood unconsciously, recklessly. I gave it due consideration.
I'd rather that people could be both entertained and given rest while reading my book than for someone to have to put the book down to take a rest. You can't just be lighting firecrackers all the time.
Few writers push the reader away with the coolness, dignity, and faint melancholy of Fleur Jaeggy.
I've written about women's lives, and I just want to write about them from being a woman. I don't need feminism on top of that when I'm writing.
I remember very vividly a little plaid dress on which my father sewed all these hanging beads, little horses and stuff. It was my favourite thing ever. I had it when I was four, and I kept it until I was 12, when I gave it to the little neighbour girl. For years, I regretted giving it to her, even though I had no use for it.
I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true.
There's something threatening about a woman who is not occupied with children... What sort of trouble will she make?
A woman will always be made to feel like a criminal, whatever choice she makes, however hard she tries. Mothers feel like criminals. Non-mothers do, too.
I really enjoyed the process of 'Women in Clothes,' but there's no way I would have done that again. It felt more like being an editor than a writer, and I longed to write again.
I've always had individual friends, but I didn't find the people I wanted to learn from as an adult until my mid-twenties.
Our delusions of omniscience play a role in our ideas of not only what we want but also what we want to escape.
Every choice you make has higher stakes - or that's how it feels.
It's so weird how our existence hinges on just absolute crazy chance, but it feels so essential. It's like, 'Nothing would be here if you weren't here,' because you are the centre of your universe.
When I was younger, I think that I felt like I could only live one way, and I had to figure out which of those one ways it was going to be. I have no anxiety about making the wrong decision.
Raffi is arguably the world's most famous children's singer.
