Sheila Heti on getting reacquainted with her imagination
"I've come to value the imagination much more. I think I didn't have access to my own imagination in my late 20s and through most of my 30s, and now I do again.
It's really just a matter of what tools are available to you, and your own self makes certain tools available to you at certain points in your life—and withdraws them at others."
Sheila Heti is a novelist, playwright, and former interviews editor for the literary magazine The Believer. We spoke with her (and her dog Feldman) about her new novel Pure Colour and how her novels come into being.
Pure Colour
Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.
As a girl, Sheila Heti saw herself in a favourite book series by Bernice Thurman Hunter, the first of which was That Scatterbrain Booky: "Those books were so important to me. That character I felt like she was me. She wanted to be a writer, she was sort of mischievous. Even how the books described her body, small and skinny with blonde hair—she was me. Lived in Toronto, even. [...] I still give it to children."
While working on her first book, the short story collection called The Middle Stories, she was inspired by Jane Bowles' novel Two Serious Ladies: "Her language was just so captivating to me." Also she says of that time, "I was reading a lot of Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm, and a lot of fables. Aesop, things like that. A kind of self-conscious storytelling."
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