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Sheila Heti’s last novel, How Should a Person Be?, opens with the question of its title ‘For years and years I asked it of everyone I met,’ the narrator says The problem with this question, as she discovers, is that it’s infinitely open-ended; no two people give the same answer, or behave in the same way The unnamed narrator of Motherhood, who shares various biographical details with the narrator of How Should a Person Be?, and with Heti herself, is also preoccupied with a question This question is a problem for the opposite reason: it has only two possible answers, and they’re mutually exclusive Should she have a child? And while a woman can keep wondering how she should be for the whole of her life, whether to reproduce is a decision that can’t wait forever The narrator of Motherhood is in her mid-thirties The time for deciding is now   She lives in Toronto with her partner, Miles He has a child from a previous relationship and no desire for another, but he’ll have a baby with the narrator if it’s what she really wants But how can she tell? On the one hand, she has never dreamed of being a mother On the other, she does sometimes dream that she has a child, and sometimes when she wakes from these dreams she feels happy But she’s a writer, committed to a life of art and freedom; how can she allow a child to interrupt that life? (Miles warns her darkly that one can be a great parent or a great artist, but not both) And yet, might her writing not suffer if she turns away from what increasingly seems to her ‘the central experience of life’? Everywhere she turns, her female friends are having babies But when she visits them, she feels alienated and bored But what could be worse than to fail to recognise the desire for a baby until it’s too late, and to spend the rest of one’s life in regret? Watching her agonise, Miles suggests that she write a book about motherhood Motherhood is that