YouSaid · the spoken record

Sheila Heti

lines on the record: 36
first: 2024-08-01
most recent: 2024-08-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I guess the favor is always the one that you just finished, so I guess this is my favorite at the moment. But I don't know where it fits. I mean, to me, it's kind of like the DNA of the other books maybe. There's something about it that's sort of closer to the ground or closer to the self because it's not making up a narrative. It's just the, yeah, it's just like the building blocks of a novel rather than a novel itself in some sense, even though you can read it like a novel. So I sort of feel like it's the most pure”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Way of just like picking up crime and punishment and just like reading it for an hour and putting it down and that being satisfying. I don't know. I'm just, I sort of want to see there's a different way of encountering those books that I've read before that doesn't necessarily have to involve rereading beginning to end.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean everything. I'm just rereading Tom McCarthy's remainder right now and I'm reading Thomas Mann. I don't know I don't really have a system. I just it's but I like reading fiction and nonfiction and contemporary and classics and everything I don't find that I feel a compulsion to finish a book if I'm not enjoying it and I've started trying to see what it's like to sort of gladly like read a few pages from a book and just to get a taste of that author, you know, rather than feeling like every time I start a book I have to finish it. I'm sort of curious to just look at books in a different way where it can be a sort of like a little visit, you know.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I would never have done the adaptation myself. I don't know how to write for TV or movies night. I'm not really interested in learning. I love books. I want to write books.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had a really shocked me that they wanted to make this into a TV show I couldn't imagine. I actually read the pilot script and I thought that their solution was, well, the solution this writer came up with was to make the character sort of basically a writer who was alphabetizing their diaries and thinking back on the years that they were writing about. So it seemed a little bit like a way of avoiding the problem of alpha-betizing. How do you alphabetize a TV show? I don't know. But the show didn't get picked up in the end. So I kind of feel honestly a little relieved. I didn't really love the idea of things being my things being made into movies or TV shows. I don't know.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I think it, I mean, I think that. That it's nice probably to know that the sacrifices aren't real sacrifices if you're doing what you love. I mean, I think that's from experience for me that has been true. And I don't mind sort of saying that publicly because I think that is a good thing to know.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You make a certain amount of money, and I just had not seen any examples of other ways of living. So that was huge, hugely important to see that when I was so young.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not sure if I idolized or put him on a pedestal, but there was this theater experimental theater director named Hiller Latoya who had a theater company called DNA Theater in Toronto and I started working with his company when I was 15 and I just saw the way that he lived and the decisions that he made and I understood oh you can or you maybe can do this you just you have to make choices and and I saw the choices that he made and even the people that that he cast in his plays the choices that they made and it was the first time I ever saw how a person could live as an artist you know I come from a family where my mother's a doctor my father's an engineer they didn't have artist friends I just didn't understand how one made this life I thought well the only way you can make a life is you get a steady career and you know”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just did temping and I wrote journalism and I just didn't buy anything. have anything but that's fine like that's kind of that's you know what I mean I lived as I wanted to and I think just you know I guess I guess I think the way that a person can have a happy life is sort of just to have just to know the one thing that you want the most and if there's something that you want so much then it doesn't feel like you're giving anything up really in pursuit of that one thing and that's always how I felt like since I was 15 or 16 years old that this is all I wanted was just a life in which I could just sort of spend all day in my room and write so you know the fact that you can't buy a fancy jam or something doesn't really matter”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think I always wanted to spend my days writing. So, you know, when I was in my twenties, a lot more of my days were spent writing journalism. I worked for the believer, I worked for a magazine in Toronto called Shift Magazine. I don't know. I mean, it's. Yeah, there's a certain amount of chaos, but there's also, I just feel like I was pretty single-minded. This was the only thing that I wanted out of life and everything else sort of was in 10th place. You know, I decided not to move to what at the time seemed to me like maybe a more exciting city because I wanted to keep my expenses low so all the money could go to rent and the rent would be low so that I could just spend all my time writing. Like I think there was just nothing else I wanted. So yeah, I don't know if that's chaotic or not.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just don't want a person to come to my book with any expectations except what they would come to any novel with, which is that you're going to this novel in order to think about humans. You know, there's something about autofiction that just makes, I just find it very off-putting. And I don't think it's a marketing term, actually. I don't think that it's a term of literary criticism. I don't think it says anything interesting about what the book is or anything at all about what the book is.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You just answered the question. I mean, it is associated with like a kind of narcissistic mode. I don't think it is. I think there's all fiction. I mean, I prefer the Know, I think we are in an age in which it's hard to find grand narratives and you sort of have to start from the self and sort of you just got to understand the world sort of from your own experience. We don't have anyway, so I don't know. I just don't find the term autofiction lends itself to like a broad like how do I put it? I think if I think when you think, well, this is a book of autofiction, you come to it with certain expectations.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the child. I'm happy with my choice. I think that I probably would have been happy with the choice in the other direction as well. What I really wanted was to make a conscious choice, not to sort of fall into. Motherhood by, you know, just by nature or societal expectation. I just want to think about it and then make a choice because I felt like it was too important a decision just to sort of turn my head away from and have my body or whatever my own ingrained expectations of myself make for me. So yeah, but for myself, like I'm enjoying my life quite a bit and I don't have any regrets.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, she seems very childlike to me. I mean, it is a very childlike voice, exactly. There is something very sort of confident and naive about it, which is very touching.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if it's going to be great or published or the first. I think that what's difficult about it is that it's hard to make a story out of such nonsense. You know, it's hard to make a novel out of basically total randomness. Like even as I'm having a conversation with this chatbot, there is no I at the center. The chatbot there's no experience that these sentences are drawing from. So it's very hard to make a story out of them. So I'm not sure if it even works as a novel. I don't quite know how it's going to work.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well for me the way that I've been interacting with it, it's just a new voice, and it's a voice that I really like because all the voices that we're used to come from humans, which means that they come from a human experience, and this is a voice that doesn't come from experience at all. It's bizarre. And, you know, the people that program, these chatbots are trying to make them sound like humans. they can't entirely. The chatbots are always making mistakes that would be apparent to any single human, but they sort of make these mistakes with great confidence. And I find it very touching and very moving. And I just like reading it. I don't know if it's anything more than that. You know, I'm always trying to find things that I like reading and playing with those things. And it's what I've enjoyed reading the most in the last couple of years was this particular chat bot that I found.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've seen people do it in sort of a more of a short story sort of forum online with their diaries and sort of smaller literary journals and online magazines. I think it is a very tempting thing to do. You are curious about what you see and I've been surprised to read them and to see that they're all kind of interesting in the way that I think mine is interesting. Like you do get sort of the essence of the self in some way or the essence of that self as it applies to thinking about itself. Yeah, I don't know that there'll be another book where somebody's alphabetized everything because that would just be probably too close of a repetition. But I really like being on the computer and there's so many things you can do on the computer and I like using spreadsheets and that A to Z function just sort of was like, you know, beckoning me to use it. This would be a much harder project. It wouldn't be a much more tedious project without the use of the computer to just alphabetize it on the page.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I'm not scared, but you do feel like a crushing sense of failure when you try something and you're so far from the mark. So it's not really fear, more despair.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think most things I haven't done. Yeah, I think there's almost everything that I haven't done. I would love to be able to live much longer than I'll likely live and just be able to keep writing and writing and writing. Know there's so many great models of books like I Love Emil Zola, a much more naturalist kind of novel. I've never done something that seems to me in that vein, like in the vein of the 19th century great novel. I don't know that I'll ever live long enough that I'll be able to achieve something like that in my own writing. Those are the books that I admire most and enjoy and love the most, but I feel like I'm still at the building blocks stage somehow. I don't know I guess that's something that I've not done and I don't expect I'll ever do.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just don't feel troubled by it anymore, I don't feel like I'm doing something that I think at the time it just felt sort of pointless and purposeless, but now I feel sort of excited by it. I don't really know why. I mean, you go through these various different stages and you can't really totally understand why. I just, it feels a bit like playing with dolls in a way that doesn't feel like a distraction, but like maybe there's something to discover there.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I said that in like twenty ten or twenty eleven, so I don't feel that way anymore. I'm sort of interested in it all over again. I think at the time I just felt I might have even been earlier. I think at the time I just felt like I didn't see the point. It just felt too far away from life. And the questions that I had when I was writing had to do with how to live and what kind of, you know, you know, what kind of morality you applies now. And it didn't seem to me like I would answer any of that by, you know, coming up with inventing characters and inventing a story. I felt like I had to look more closely sort of in a more documentary sort of way at what I was actually living and what the people around me were going through. I didn't want to look away from the world because I didn't think that would help.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I hope humor, some kind of humor about how we are kind of the same creature over and over again, some kind of humor about how in life the smallest things like shopping for a scarf go beside these big existential questions, just how the big and the small really press up against each other in life in a way that I find kind of funny humor, I think rhythm. I care a lot about beauty and rhythm when I was editing this book. So something about, yeah, humor and beauty, I guess.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's easier in a way to write with such a strict constraint or to edit within such a strict constraint because the difficult thing about writing sort of straight fiction is that the imagination has no boundaries and you can sort of do anything and there's something a little discomforting about that. But in the case of a project like this, it's very clear what needs to be done. The sentences are in their order. They're already written all that My job entails is sort of figuring out what the values are that I want to express in the book. And that's easier than all the other freedoms that come with writing something from scratch.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, in Canada it's published as fiction in the UK it's non fiction in the US it's published as memoir so I think the publishers couldn't agree what to call it they just sort of did what would be best for the market in their territory I don't have an opinion like I don't think it is entirely fiction. I don't think it is entirely nonfiction. I think it's just well it is exactly what it is, you know, a diary that's been reorganized and edited. I don't know what you would call that.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think it was weird by the time a book comes out I've worked on it for so long that it doesn't really feel like I'm it doesn't even feel like it's me or that I'm revealing anything and I don't even really relate to it on the level of subject matter I'm just really relating to it on the level of like is this sentence the way it should be do I need to tweak this sentence do I need to you know so I'm looking at the book at a at a on a level that doesn't feel revealing anymore it just feels like craft so I never feel like by the time that I come around to publish a book I feel anything like embarrassment or or that I'm yeah that I'm I'm showing myself at all I'm just really concerned with the surface at that point so I feel pretty detached from it by the time that it comes out”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What is it all add up to? I don't think I can answer it or briefly. I don't know. It's just life, you know. It's just the experience of living. There's not really an ad up to.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it is having to do with age. I'm 47 and a lot of people at this age, their hormones start changing. And I think you sort of actually sort of become a different person when you're.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ah, I don't know, I mean I've already started the next book it's these conversations with this chatbot and I mean presumably you know, I already had this sense that I was going into a place where I'd be less interested in my ego or the ego because I have been interested in exploring this like computer consciousness. So I think I was sort of already on some level on my way there. And I think that's the case with writing that you're sort of you start writing before you know what you're writing about and then you kind of catch up to it. So I don't know unless this book, this computer book doesn't work out, which it's always, it always feels possible to me that the book that I'm working on is just going to be thrown out. I still feel like that with this computer one that I'm working on.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think sort of dropping of some kind of ego that I was like, I don't mean ego and I just mean like I had this very certain sense of myself that I was sort of carting along with me and always trying to keep sight of. And I feel like in the last month that's just been falling away. I mean, a lot of things in my life have sort of changed without my wanting them to change. And then I had this mushroom trip that kind of broke things down even further, which I guess is the point of psychedelics. And I just feel very separate from that self that I was carting around.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think I did, and I think I came to the conclusion that one doesn't change, but then in the last month I you know, and it's been about four months since the book came out, and I started writing these diaries in 2005. So that's sort of a 20-year span. So I sort of took it as a truth that one doesn't change, but I think maybe every 20 years you change, because in the last month, I've felt like a lot of changes have happened. Maybe there's something about writing a book. I think there is something about writing a book where you sort of get stuck in the way in a way of being because you can't change when you're writing a book or else the book just has no anchor. The anchor of the book is in you and in your sort of being one way. And you have to be one way in order to have a goal. If you're changing, your goals change. So I kind of feel like, yeah, for those 20 years, maybe there was a certain amount of repetition that feels like it's falling away now.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, my boyfriend called him my procrastination project. I mean, I was working on motherhood when I was writing this book and or editing this book and I was working on pure color. Both were very emotional and very difficult books to write. So, you know, on the days that I didn't want to work on that, I would come and play around with this. It was much, there was like no emotion behind this. It was just decision making kind of sort of seeing like what sentences would be nice next to each other and cutting sentences. And it wasn't hard work, but it wasn't emotionally taxing work.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To publish it. Yeah. No, I don't know. I mean, I just kind of feel like everything that I write has that question behind it. Like, is this just for me or is this for the world? And usually at a certain point, I realize, no, it's more pleasure for me to think about an audience seeing this than to just be playing around with it for myself. So at some point, it always turns. It becomes something of a gift or a performance or, yeah, something to share.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it took fourteen years of editing to sort of get it to that place. I mean, I wasn't sure at the beginning of the project what I wanted the end result to be. I thought maybe should this be an internet project? Should I not cut at all? It took a really long time to realize that actually thinking about it as a novel rather than as an experiment was the right way to go.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, I mean, I write my diaries on my computer, so they were already all on the computer, and then I just put them all into one document and did a bunch of things and loaded them into a spreadsheet program Excel. And then there's the function A to Z. So basically the spreadsheet program alphabetized them by sentence. So that was the first step.”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was just curious to see how it would read if you put yeah ten years of diaries into alphabetical rather than chronological order I was curious to see like what the repetitions would be what time would look like what narrative would look like whether change is something that actually happens in a life or there's just the illusion of change I was just kind of curious to see what I would learn if I did that”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A book about how difficult it is to change why we don't want to and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections, a book that does only one thing, one thing at a time. A book that even the hardest of men would read. That is a game”
2024-08-01 · Intelligence Squared · Is Telling a Life Story as Easy as ABC? with Sheila Heti · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT