I had this obsession earlier this fall where I was listening to every podcast episode and interview Sheila Heti has ever done. By mid-October, I had listened to every single thing I could get my hands on under the sun. Except for one, an interview she did on the Red Scare Podcast, paywalled on their patreon. I had debated this for many moons. I was dying to hear what these three women had to say to each other. When I was explaining this to my friend over dinner, she asked why this author? Why this obsession?
It is hard to say, I think mostly I love to be obsessed with things, and secondly, reading Motherhood was a pivotal point for me. I felt that after I read it, I was different. I didn’t know a novel could be written like that. It dissolved boundaries around my writing that I didn’t even know I had. I felt like it was possible to write exactly how I wanted to.
Motherhood is about decisions and babies. Although not really, it is about the soul of time. I first heard of it at an artist residency in the south of Spain. The residency that I cleaned. The residency that I shovelled goat manure at moving it from one place to another. I was visiting the studio of two women I befriended. They had come to make a book, pictures and captions written during one of their fathers slow decay into dementia. It was clever and funny, and when they displayed their work to everyone at the residency I cried.
Motherhood was lying on the table.
“What is this,” I said, picking it up.
“Oh it is this Canadian author. She is wondering whether or not to have a baby, but it’s about more than that.” She trailed off, leaving it there.
What was the more-than-that? I thought.
It wasn’t until much later. When I came home from traveling in February that I decided to read it. I ordered it online and it arrived at my parent’s front door step like a gift.
This is all to say that I was obsessively listening to thirty podcast episodes, because I wanted a reminder of that freedom I was granted last winter. Her voice was a great comfort to me. It made me feel like I could be the writer I wanted to be.
A few weeks ago I gave in and subscribed to the Red Scare Podcast’s patreon. The podcast was interesting, but underwhelming. I had naturally built too much mystery and intrigue around the whole thing, but I came away with a few sentences that deeply touched me.
They are as follows:
“Maybe you need PMS to break up with someone. It is the universe's gift to help you end something.”
“Men live in space. Women live in time.”
It is true there is something about being bound to my cycle that makes me feel like I intimately live in time. And last night, on the full moon, I woke up out of my sleep with an unbearable fury over something that happened at work, and all the things I would say to better assert myself.
I thought to myself:
Fuck this shit.
I’m not going to fucking take this.
Wow, PMS really does draw a line in the sand.
Talk soon xx
-Thai