Approximately a decade ago, Sheila Heti—author of more than 10 books, including Motherhood and How Should a Person Be—decided to revisit the diaries she had been keeping for years. Curious as to how she might have changed over the time reflected in the journals, she merged her writings into a single Excel doc and organized the sentences alphabetically with the intention of searching for patterns that could help her to answer this question. The final result, edited by Heti for aesthetic purposes and offered as a 10-part newsletter by The New York Times’ Opinion desk, coincides with the debut of Pure Colour, a dynamic and wondrous new novel from Heti in which a young woman named Mira goes to school and works in a lamp store while grieving the death of her father. For a brief time, Mira’s consciousness joins his inside of a leaf, and together there, they discuss art, time, and death until Mira’s love for a woman named Annie draws her back out. Like an orchid and the tree that serves as its host, Heti’s latest works are epiphytic: Meant to be considered together, they inhabit much of the same space, explore much of the same territory, but each from a different perspective. Both works find the author experimenting with form in order to make room for deep and complicated questions about life and all of its mysteries.
Pure Colour: A Novel
Now 12% Off
I have never wanted to keep a diary. In fact, I have deliberately avoided it. This, I recognize, is a strange confession for a writer to make, but diaries have always seemed to me if not a little bit sad (documentation of all my regrets, heartbreaks, and past foolishness? No, thank you!) then dangerous (so many of these little compendiums-of-confessions go public, and all their secrets right along with them).
Of course, my resistance to diary writing has been challenged at many different times, but I’ve always remained unmoved. When I asked the writer Yiyun Li, during a Zoom author event, if she had any advice for writing through the pandemic and she replied by suggesting I keep a record of this time to look back on later, I thought about and appreciated her advice but ultimately couldn’t bring myself to budge. After all, who wants to revisit the most difficult times in their life or look back at those versions of themself that they have worked so hard to leave behind? Wasn’t living with our memories of these times and past selves more than enough?
The entries in Heti’s diary project, shared with us like hundreds of secrets whispered gently into our ears, reveal just how intimately we want to know artists—and ourselves.
In other words, they offer a way to get to know not just Heti better, but ourselves, too.
Heti’s ingenious work—part of a long and dynamic tradition of writers-keeping-diaries including Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Sylvia Plath, and Alice Walker, to name a few—exposes many of her fears and preoccupations while exploring timely and timeless questions about art, ambition, identity, love, and relationships—Am I looking for someone to love? Am I wasting my time? Do we have to suffer till the end of history? How does someone shift their axis?—but most revelatory is her curiosity about what might happen if we looked at our diaries—and ourselves—in a new way.
The entries reveal to us just how intimately we want to know artists—and ourselves.
How, she seems to be asking, might we see ourselves and what might we learn if we did shift our axis—if we let go of what we thought we knew and considered ourselves in a new light, untethered from our pasts and the narratives we have long been telling ourselves?
We read other people’s diaries motivated by the delicious feeling that we are being let in on their secrets; if we are lucky, we come away with a new way of reconciling our own.
By presenting the lines from her diary out of order or, more accurately, outside of the timeline in which each thought or question occurred to her, without obliterating the past, Heti removes the trap that we so often fall into of defining ourselves by our past.
It is okay, she seems to be saying, just to live.
It is okay not to have it all figured out.
How refreshing and necessary, her work suggests, it may be to pause occasionally to reconsider our life stories, to dismantle those that may haunt us or aren’t serving us well, to see and recognize the entirety of who we are rather than chiding ourselves for what went wrong or what might have been.
In Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963, readers encounter Susan Sontag famously reflecting on her own experience of diary-writing: “In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself.”
According to Heti, we are all in this together.
We are all artists creating ourselves over and over again.
In a recent interview for The Guardian, she explains: “I never feel exposed because there’s nothing inside me that isn’t in you. All writing is about all of us, so it doesn’t feel like I’m saying anything that isn’t just about the human experience.” Heti knows that she is creating herself but recognizes that we are creating ourselves, too. In Heti’s world, this self-creation or self-actualization is art. We are all artists creating ourselves over and over again.
In her novel Pure Colour, Heti seems to pick up where her diaries leave off and to take things a step further, asking: “What if we were made in the image of a Creator, also an artist, who is creating over and over again, too?”
In the book, which many critics have noted resists easy categorization and summarization, Heti imagines a world that is a kind of first draft made by a frustrated Creator/Artist.
In Heti’s diaries, readers find the author standing back to take a look at her creation. In Pure Colour, it is the Creator of the world who stands back to look at theirs. Both projects find Heti deliberately stepping away from many of the traditional structures and frameworks of fiction in order to make room for the exploration of some of life’s most intense and ineffable experiences—the kind of experiences we all share but still find so difficult to put into words—like grieving or falling in love. It is here, where Heti frees herself from traditional structures and constraints, that her work seems to move from being esoteric to fully grounded.
Readers will find in Heti's recent work the author living out her own human experience as art: suffering, questioning, falling in love, wondering who she is and who she will be, hoping, doubting, changing her mind, wondering if she will ever find an answer. And with the freedom of the forms she has chosen, Heti gives herself permission to ask questions without the obligation of answering them. She gives herself permission just to be. It is this which seems to draw her so much closer to one of the goals of so much realist fiction—telling truths about life, about the human experience:
It is good to ask questions, to wonder and to ponder.
It is okay not to have all the answers.
We are always in a state of becoming.
We can always look at ourselves in a new way.
We can tell a new story.
It is okay not to have everything all figured out; it is human to keep trying.
Je Banach is the author of fiction, essays, and more than 100 reading guides to works of world literature for publishing houses. A previous winner of the Connecticut Artist Fellowship for Fiction and the New Boston Fund Fellowship in Fiction, Banach was an original member of the Yale Writers’ Workshop faculty in fiction and a longtime contributor to Harold Bloom’s literary series with Infobase Publishing.
Pure Colour
This content is imported from OpenWeb. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
"pure" - Google News
March 25, 2022 at 10:06PM
https://ift.tt/OlUJYF8
"Pure Colour" by Sheila Heti Book Review and Details - Oprah Mag
"pure" - Google News
https://ift.tt/buiWqh5
https://ift.tt/LgBIpjK
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to ""Pure Colour" by Sheila Heti Book Review and Details - Oprah Mag"
Post a Comment