Sheila Heti : Motherhood

In Into Being Lily Dunn explores the ways in which writing one’s life has the potential to transform it; how writing, if done well, can produce “symbolic repair.” We look at Virginia Woolf’s notion of “moments of being” as a means and method to find the form that best fits your s ...  Show more

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s new novel Discipline is set in Sydney, Australia in 2021 during Ramadan. Discipline follows two Palestinians there, one in media and one in academia, where each has to confront questions of silence and complicity in their respective fields. As Israel intensif ...  Show more

Skye C. Cleary is a philosopher, writer and university teacher. In her new book How to Be Authentic: Simone de Beauvoir and the Quest for Fulfillment (St. Martin’s Press, 2022) offers an introduction to Beauvoir’s thinking about authenticity and how experience and situation shape ...  Show more

My guest today is the brilliant Sheila Heti, author of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? In this episode we discuss her latest book Pure Colour, a new novel l about art, love, loss and time. It has been described as a galaxy of a novel: explosive, bright, huge and streaked w ...  Show more

Judith Butler joins Adam Shatz to discuss a landmark in feminist thought, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949). Dazzling in its scope, The Second Sex incorporates anthropology, psychology, historiography, mythology and biology to ask an ‘impossible’ question: what is a woma ...  Show more

Why do women in contemporary western societies experience contradiction between their autonomous and maternal selves? What are the origins of this contradiction and the associated ‘double shift’ that result in widespread calls to either ‘lean in’ or ‘opt out’? How are some mother ...  Show more