Review: “Motherhood” by Sheila Heti
I will die on the hill of loving this book.
I simply love this book. I was absolutely touched by Shelia Heti’s honesty and her life.
Without question, I am the target audience for this book – a young woman unsure about motherhood – which makes it easy for me to love Motherhood. Perhaps, I am even a little blinded by my capacity to resonate with the story.
Heti is so frank with her readers. Some parts of the text read like a stream of consciousness, others as an intense, beautiful reflection. She goes so far as to record her menstrual cycle and describe sex with her boyfriend, but this never crosses the line into unnecessary over-sharing. Heti is honest enough for Motherhood to feel intimate and real without sounding like her personal diary. Alongside its honesty, Motherhood’s utter beauty is a gorgeous reminder that ordinary people’s lives are sad and precious and touching.
*Spoilers from this point on*
At the outset, it is unclear what Motherhood is going to be about. We know from the blurb that Heti is deciding whether to have kids or not in this book, but Heti does not seem to know this at the beginning of the book. Instead, we read along as the subject of the book gradually becomes clear. However, in the last part of the book the subject changes again as Heti starts to think more about her mother and her maternal grandmother. Heti realises she must break the generational cycle these women were stuck in; trying to live their lives to please their parents, but not being able to fulfil their own desires. Once Heti comes to terms with this, we are given a heartfelt moment where Heti’s Mother reads the draft of Motherhood and sends a sweet email to tell Heti she is proud of her.
At this point in the book, I found myself teary-eyed and totally fixated. I think it is quite common for mothers and daughters to have fraught relationships; I would put this down to internalised misogyny and the patriarchy pitting women against each other. So, there is something so sublime about witnessing pure love between a mother and daughter. That is what really touched me about Motherhood, I set out reading this book wanting to think more about whether I wanted to have children; I was not expecting to read about a maternal love so affecting that it left me in tears.