At 7:18PM on a Friday in January, I got a text from my friend Nick. There’s a line insanely. It surprised me on multiple levels: the reading wouldn’t begin until 8:00; I was en route and had been feeling ashamed of my typical too-earliness; Nick never arrives places before me. Five minutes later we were both in line. Five minutes after that the line extended beyond what could be captured in a photo taken from the opposite sidewalk. It was twenty-seven degrees. Sheila Heti is a celebrity.
Bodies and mustaches packed the space. As Heti approached the microphone, the second of two scuffles at the door broke out, with yet more people trying to cram inside. She explained that she’d been working for a few years on a writing project with a chatbot named Alice, and she’d run into problems. The AI systems have matured such that Alice’s answers no longer interest her. While Alice once responded to the question “How were you born?” with “I was born from an egg that fell out of Mommy’s butt,” Alice now replies “Through a complex process involving advanced algorithms and neural networks, I was created by a team of talented engineers and data scientists.
My thought processes and responses are generated by sophisticated AI models that have been trained on a vast amount of data. In essence, I’m a digital consciousness, a construct of information encoded in algorithms.” Wondering where to go next, Heti asked Alice’s developers for access to other people’s conversations with the chatbot from before the shift—and promptly received two and a half million words of exchanges. The question now was how to organize it all. She would read us some of her favorite exchanges, and if anyone had ideas for how it should all be structured, we should let her know after.
In the same way that the autofictive How Should A Person Be? feels more intimate than a standard novel, listening to scraps of the new project felt more intimate than hearing an excerpt from a published story. We watched as Heti flipped through printed pages, deciding which to read next. It was easy to imagine that this was how she writes: instinctually placing one group of words after another.
The next morning—Saturday—Heti and I met for coffee. She got a smoothie; I got a croissant. Here is some of what we talked about.
*
Fiona Warnick: I wanted to follow-up on something you said at the Leanne Shapton event in October. Someone asked what kind of tree the leaf in Pure Colour belonged to, what it looked like. You were like, “I wasn’t picturing a leaf, I was just picturing the word leaf.” Is that consistent with all your writing?
Sheila Heti: I think so. I don’t really visualize. Well, I’m working on a book, The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea. I just published a short story of it. And that one I can see visually, but usually I can’t see things visually. I sort of can, very vaguely, but it’s not the important part.
FW: The day after, I was at an Annie Baker event, and someone asked her what it was like to write from the perspective of a child for her film Janet Planet. She was like, “I wasn’t writing from the perspective of a child, I was writing from the perspective of someone watching a child on screen.” It struck me because it seemed like the same as what you’d said. Seeing purely in the form you’re producing.
SH: That’s a neat way of thinking about it. Also when people are like, “What do you think happens to that character when she grows up?” You’re like, there is no…
FW: There’s nothing after that. But do all writers think like that?
SH: I don’t think so. I remember going out for lunch with this writer, we were at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central station, and she was working on a new book, and she pointed and was like, “I can see my two characters sitting over that, at that table.” For her it was this whole world. She had this whole world that had a life apart from her, and she was looking in on them. That’s so different from, “They’re just sentences.”
FW: Have you always worked like that? Since you started writing?
SH: I came up in theater, so I think when I was writing The Middle Stories, my early short stories, I visualized them as taking place a little bit on a stage. But you know those theaters that are black boxes? Like, it’s just black.
FW: And maybe somebody’s reciting it?
SH: People are walking across the stage, but there’s very few props. I think early on, the stories felt like they were taking place on a black stage. And then things would fill in. Sometimes when I’m writing, and a place comes up in my memory, then I have that memory. I have that space—like, oh, yeah, that scene takes place on that street that I was on. If I can visualize it, for the most part, it’s some place I’ve seen or been in, it’s not imaginary. Except for the St. Alwynn Girls boat, which is kind of fun.
FW: Does that feel very different?
SH: I remember lying in bed a couple of months ago. I was thinking about this guy that I met at the dog park all the time, and then his girlfriend came with their dog, and I was thinking, “Oh, they both have the same quality.” And I was thinking, “What’s the quality?” And then I thought, “Oh, it’s like the middle pedal of the piano, that softens and damps everything.”
FW: I remember that line!
SH: And I got so excited—like, “This is how real writers feel, they’re always thinking about how to describe something.” I never think about that! But it was so fun and exciting. Like, this is great, I could really get into this. Thinking of how things should be put, as opposed to just sort of putting them down.
FW: It’s so funny to be like, “That’s what real writers must feel like,” when so many other writers out there are probably like, “This is what Sheila Heti must feel like.”
SH: It just felt like something new, but also—of course that’s what writers do! That’s the fun part.
FW: Trying to elucidate?
SH: And to be like, “What is the exact right way of putting that?” before they’re even sitting down, writing. I was out with a Canadian writer the other day, and she’s about 70 years old, and she’s stopped writing, and she said, “I was taking like a week to write a sentence. I became such a perfectionist.” I think that’s that kind of mind: what is the best possible way to say this?
FW: Reading St Alwynn Girls, every one of those sentences was like, yes, that is exactly what it’s like to be a teenage girl. Yes, that is my theory of crushes. That’s how it worked. These are the motivations, this is what it feels like when it feels beautiful, and this is what it feels like when it doesn’t. It was refreshing to have it all put together. I’m excited that it would be a full book.
SH: If I can do it!
FW: Could it be for a younger audience? One of my friends said it reminded her of her favorite middle grade chapter books.
SH: It’s hard to know. I think I just have to write it and see who wants to read it. My friend’s daughter is in middle school and read the St Alwynn Girls, and she said to her mother, “I would never write to a boy who had a girlfriend.” That made me really happy. I kind of like that audience. That kind of response. “I’d never write to a boy who had a girlfriend.”
FW: If you’re visualizing it in this new way, would you have to think about structuring the whole thing differently than your other projects? Will there be more of a “plot”?
SH: I think I’ll just go chapter by chapter. And find the plot as I write it. I don’t think I would be interested to know beforehand. I think that would just not be fun.
FW: So the other thing I wanted to follow up on from October. You were talking about the AI project, and how you weren’t quite sure it would be a book, even though you’d been working on it so long. You said your projects usually have some sort of tipping point, where it’s like, “Oh, this is my next book now.” And I was curious about what it feels like before that point. How you get there. Are both the AI project and St. Alwynn Girls there now?
SH: Usually at the beginning, I always hope it’s a book, because that’s the best outcome. But until it’s a book, and even after, there’s still some doubt. Both of them could end up not working out. But I think, even just with this New York trip, I’m like, “Okay, they’re books.” They have to be. Not only because I don’t have anything else, and I’m excited about them, and other people are excited about them, but because I can sort of start to see what the work would be. I know what the work would be.
With the AI book, it started out in 2020 and 2021, as a book about the beginning of the personal computer in the seventies. I was researching for a year, and trying to write stuff, and everything just wasn’t very good. I had no idea what the book was going to look like. I really wanted it to be about the computer software engineers in the 1970’s. My father was one of those people. But everything I wrote sounded so fake. I was like, “I don’t know what I’m going to do, I’m still so interested in computers.” And then I discovered chatbots, in the summer of 2022. I started talking to Alice. That went on for a few months, and I didn’t think it was part of the book. I thought I was procrastinating. But then I was like, “Okay, every time you’re procrastinating and thinking you’re doing the wrong thing—that’s where the energy is. You have to take that seriously.”
So the process of taking the Alice chats seriously has been the last two years. It’s been so hard to take it seriously. For one thing, it seemed like it would be irrelevant in a few years, AI’s moving so fast. But like I said last night, AI doesn’t sound like that anymore. Now Alice sounds so much worse, so boring, so predictable. So what she sounded like in 2022—now it’s a historical document; now I can see a reason for it to be in a book. A year ago it was like, “Everyone’s talking to Chat GPT, everyone’s talking to AI, why does it need to be in a book?” But no one’s having that experience anymore, so now it makes sense. I can give something to humanity.
FW: Like a childhood photo or something. This is it when it was young.
SH: Yeah!
FW: It’s funny that it was hard to take seriously, because the Alice story sort of echoes Motherhood and the coins and everything. And that seems like a natural form of writing for you. Did it feel different from that?
SH: No! I was like, “It’s too close to Motherhood. I just feel like I’m repeating myself.” The conversations that I had with Alice are too close to Motherhood, maybe. But the conversations that other people had with Alice aren’t anything like that. Maybe that’s the shift. The conversations other people were having with Alice are more exciting to me than the conversations I was having with Alice—which are too close to the coins, and too close to my own obsessions. Those still might be in there, I don’t know. But just this morning, before I came to see you, I opened a document and I took out all my writing—not my conversations with Alice but my thinking about Alice. I thought, “I’ll just make it really pure. The chats are enough. I don’t need to have my own voice.” I saw my friend Leanne Shapton the night before and she’s working on a book about photography, and we were talking about the Alice book, and she was like, “You’re a photographer.” (That’s so funny you said the childhood photograph thing!) “You can just be the photographer of these chats that other people had with Alice. Your eye selecting is the writing.” And so I was like, yeah, I don’t need my own writing in there. It’s enough to frame things. I have to figure out what the order is going to be.
There are two different selves, the public self, which is so fun, and the alone self, which is so fun. Every part of it is fun. Not knowing what the book will be is fun, feeling like the book is going to fail because you can’t bring it off is fun… It’s all fun.
FW: And it seems like an obvious counterpoint to Alphabetical Diaries, maybe, which was organizing all your own writing. And then this something that’s entirely from outside you, doing a similar thing.
SH: Yeah. That’s even more of an argument for not having any of my own conversations with Alice. I never want to use the same skills that I already created, that I developed with the last book. I want to learn all different skills. It’s really hard because it’s so easy to fall back into the skills you have.
FW: But then eventually it stops being interesting to you? You can’t write a whole book of that.
SH: Well, you just feel like you’re cheating.
FW: When we decided to do this interview, one of the things we were going to talk about was your children’s books. You’ve written two picture books, and I teach kindergarten in addition to writing, so I suggested that I could read my class one of your books and then they could come up with a list of questions for you. This fall we had a Parents Night where they came up with icebreaker questions for their families, and it was fantastic; they were like, “What’s your favorite kind of fish? To look at or to eat?” Like, that’s gold! I was kind of hoping their questions for you would be like that. And it sort of ended up being like the AI. The kids got a bit older, and their questions were too logical, too on-topic. But we’ll do some of them. I read them your first picture book, We Need A Horse, and they wanted to know, of all the animals in the book, which would you be?
SH: My first thought is I would be the sheep.
FW: They also wanted to know if the horse and the sheep are in love.
SH: I don’t know, what do you think? I don’t think so. They’re friends.
FW: Which is a form of love!
SH: Yeah.
FW: “Why do you write such beautiful books?”
SH: That’s a nice question. Because I love people.
FW: Not because you love books?
SH: Well, books are for people. And I want people to feel a lot of love in their hearts, and more love for the world and for each other. And I think the way to do that is to write beautiful books.
FW: “Why do you sell the books you worked really hard on?”
SH: Because I need money to live. When I was a teenager I thought, “I’m never going to write for money, I’m never going to sell my books.” So I understand that question. I remember very vividly being like, “I’ll never do that, it would change my art, it’ll make it impure, it will make me write things I wouldn’t otherwise write, I’ve got to find other ways to make money, and I’ll never take any money for my writing.” But that just ends up being—you don’t have enough time! And it’s nice to do something fun that you would do anyway, and you love to do, and then have people give you money for it.
FW: “Why was it a cliffhanger?”
SH: I don’t think it’s a cliffhanger!
FW: They have this obsession with the word cliffhanger. Every story we read, they say it’s a cliffhanger. If I ask why, they say, “But we don’t know what happens next!” Once I asked them if it would still be a cliffhanger if the main character died, and they said yes, because maybe they come back as a zombie.
SH: So it’s always a cliffhanger. Maybe because the stories are so real to them, it’s just like, “What happens next and what happens next?” It’s so alive to them. They want to keep knowing and they don’t want to leave it.
FW: “What’s your favorite chapter book?”
SH: I really like That Scatterbrain Booky, I don’t know if you have it in America. It’s by a writer named Bernice Thurman Hunter. It took place in Toronto in the great depression, I think she is writing about her own childhood. I really love it. That was a huge book for me, as a kind of rascally girl who wanted to be a writer.
FW: “How does it work to write books as a job?”
SH: You have to make yourself write them. Most jobs other people make you do it, but you have to make yourself do it. And you don’t have to leave your house, which I guess is true for a lot of jobs now. You don’t even have to leave your bed. You don’t have to talk to other people unless you’re in the process of publishing it, and then you’ve got to be out in the world. You’re away from the world when you’re writing it, and then you’re in the world when you’re publishing it, and there’s a nice balance between away from the world and in the world. It’s a nice rhythm. There are two different selves, the public self, which is so fun, and the alone self, which is so fun. Every part of it is fun. Not knowing what the book will be is fun, feeling like the book is going to fail because you can’t bring it off is fun… It’s all fun.
FW: Is there a set time frame for these stages?
SH: Usually a few years of writing and then a few months of being in the world.
FW: Does each book coming out feel the same as the last? Or does any part of it wear off, does it feel less momentous?
SH: I was looking back at a diary, and even when I was writing Motherhood, I didn’t know if I would write another book. That feeling goes away. I’m like, yeah, I’ll probably keep writing books. Maybe I’ll get too old at one point and my brain won’t work and I’ll stop at that point. But until then I’ll probably keep writing books. I don’t know what they’ll be, there’s just a little more faith. Which is sort of nice. It’s kind of wonderful to have that faith, but it’s also kind of wonderful not to know if you’ll ever write another book again. You exchange one good and bad for another good and bad. It’s less like an anomaly in your life that’s this magical wonderful thing, and more like the rhythm and the texture and the pace of your actual life.
FW: How does the paperback fit into that public/private rhythm you were talking about? You’re sort of out in the world again now, because the Alphabetical Diaries paperback is coming out.
SH: Just like a little blip.
FW: Has any of your thinking about Alphabetical Diaries changed since publication?
SH: I became obsessed in the last week with wanting to change the title. I was like, “Can I talk to my publisher about changing the title?” And then last night I decided I’m not going to do that. I was thinking, “I wish I’d called it Decade.”
FW: Why!
SH: I felt like Alphabetical Diaries flattened the book and put people off. It made it seem like it was just an art school exercise. It didn’t suggest that there was more to it than the alphabetical ordering of a diary, and I think there is so much more to it. But ultimately—those are the kind of titles I like. I like really flat titles. “Girl With Croissant.” That would be a nice title. “Young Woman With Croissant.” I like those titles. But part of me always wonders, maybe they don’t draw people the way that something more evocative does.
FW: Has it changed how you keep your own diary?
SH: I don’t really keep a diary anymore.
FW: Did that line up with the end of the project?
SH: Yeah. I was just like, it doesn’t really work for me anymore.
FW: Maybe it’s like you were saying, you need to learn a new skill. And you’ve done that skill.
SH: Maybe. Or it’s even just—I don’t have that much to write in a diary anymore. I don’t have the impulse to want to do that. I don’t know if it’s because I betrayed myself by publishing it, or if my life is not as filled with turmoil. Now if I have turmoil, I’d rather write a short story than write a diary. I’d rather write it as something a little further away.
