{Review #5} Sheila Heti's take on the Paradox of Choice, Basically

I was loving this book until I wasn't so much.

This book is Heti's autofictional exploration of the question of motherhood. For the majority of her life, she has never felt the need to be a mother, yet now that she is over thirty and deeply in love with her husband (who is a father and doesn't want another child) she has been thinking she might want to become one. She's not sure, hence the book. During four years, she flips coins in an I-Ching-ish manner, tracks her moods through her menstrual cycle, and for some reason even takes some pictures that make it into the book.

I bought this for three reasons. First, I am addicted to slow autofictional meditation on anythings books. Maggie Nelson, Ali Smith, Kate Zambreno, Kyo Maclear, Sara Baume, Deborah Levy, Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing... All these intelligent  women dissecting their own lives and connecting them with broader themes, with varying degrees of success, addressing some of my biggest existential anxieties... how could I resist?

Second, I am on the fence about motherhood myself, and when the time comes to make a decision I think I will ask myself a lot of the same questions. 

Third, this passage:

When I was younger, thinking about whether I wanted children, I always came back to this formula: if no one had told me anything about the world, I would have invented boyfriends. I would have invented sex, friendships, art. I would not have invented child-rearing. (...) it wouldn't have occurred to me as something to do. In fact, it would have sounded like a task to very much avoid. (41)

I'm not sure it is true (at all), but I was hooked.

The book has been criticized for privileged navel-gazing and unfortunate commentary that people take to mean that (1) Heti believes only women grapple with the question of reproduction and (2) she posits that choosing not to be a mother means choosing to be incomplete. The former is valid, but the latter two are a misunderstanding of the book's conclusion. Yes, in her whining, Heti overextends her argument, but her concerns are still reasonable.

The question of parenthood is still very much a sexed issue. If not, ask any female celebrity who has chosen not to have children, count how many articles describe them as "childless". Men still have the luxury of procreating and getting credit without being as involved as the mother, if at all. For them, the question is not as fundamentally life-changing as for women. Furthermore, as Heti points out, women nowadays are encouraged to be the "do-it-all" career + motherhood types (and often criticized for this too!) and if a woman chooses not have children, then she'd better be prepared to answer questions about it for life and do something interesting and fulfilling with that life. Only men have the right to squander away their lives and not conceive. Yes, even now. (And again, neither Heit and I are saying it should be like this, only that it is.) Similarly, criticizing her for envying homosexual couples for not experiencing this pressure is beside the point (granted, she could have phrased it better). Yes, a lot of homosexual couples do want children and must navigate a myriad of societal issues to get there. Yet because of this same structural rejection, we will never grapple with the same expectation as heterosexual women do (or women in long-term heterosexual relationships), which is the author's whole point. 

Thus, the paradox of choice that assaults Heti. In ye olde times, it was motherhood or spinsterhood. Nowadays, there are so many tools to design your own life... which of the paths will make you the happiest, the most fulfilled? Will you look back and regret the road not taken, whatever that is? This is the central question of the book, with a focus on motherhood. 

But yes, the book is overindulgent and way too long. The flipping of the coins surfaces on and off throughout the book, as does every other semblance of an engaging structure. Maybe it was too personal to be properly edited down, maybe it was more about process than product. Most certainly, it is all about the author and not at all about he reader.

Would I recommend Motherhood? Only if you, like me, enjoy this specific subgenre (see examples above) and are interested in the question of motherhood yourself. In the end I did get a lot of quotes out of it and would revisit those sections, but it's still a flawed book that overstays its welcome.