Motherhood, and a Decision With No Procedure

Most large decisions come with a procedure attached, and the procedure is so familiar that it is rarely noticed as one. Gather the information. Find somebody who has the expertise and ask them. Lay the options side by side and compare them on the things that matter. Where you can, run a small version first and see how it goes. Almost every consequential choice an adult makes — where to work, where to live, whether to take the operation, whether to move countries — yields at least partially to some combination of those four moves.

There is one very large decision that yields to none of them, and a person meeting it for the first time often assumes the failure is hers. She reads, and the reading does not converge. She asks people, and they tell her about themselves. She tries to imagine the two lives, and finds she can imagine neither with any accuracy at all. And behind it there is a clock she did not set and cannot negotiate with. So she concludes that she is being indecisive, or cowardly, or insufficiently in touch with what she wants.

In 2018 a Canadian writer published a book that sits inside that exact position for its entire length and does not climb out of it. The book is Motherhood, by Sheila Heti. Its narrator is a woman in her late thirties trying to work out whether to have a child, and the book is not a report on a decision that was reached elsewhere. The deciding is the book. Nothing is settled in advance and delivered in narrative form afterwards.

Its most discussed formal device is that the narrator puts questions to chance. She flips three coins and reads them as yes or no, in a method the book takes from the I Ching, and the results structure long stretches of the text as a dialogue between the narrator and something that is not her. Reviewers called this brilliant and reviewers called it a stunt. This essay argues that it is neither whimsy nor nihilism, but an honest response to a real structural problem, and that the problem is worth naming for its own sake, entirely apart from whether anybody enjoys the book.

Sheila Heti was born in Toronto in 1976 and is a Canadian writer. Motherhood was published in 2018: by Knopf Canada on 1 May, by Henry Holt and Company in the United States on the same day, and by Harvill Secker in the United Kingdom on 24 May, at around three hundred pages. It is presented by its publishers as a novel.

Heti has described the form in public. Speaking to Kate Wolf for the Los Angeles Review of Books in May 2018, she said she had first conceived the project as nonfiction and moved away from that because, as she put it, nonfiction feels to her like an argument whereas a novel is a series of questions. In the same conversation she declined to treat the narrator’s ambivalence as a symptom in need of explanation, describing the dilemma instead as a normal one and the question itself as fundamentally absurd. She has also said, of the coins, that the book does not work if a reader believes the tosses were invented, and the book carries a note at the front stating that all results from the flipping of coins in it come from the flipping of actual coins.

The mechanics of the device are simple and have been widely reported: three coins, with two or three heads read as yes and two or three tails read as no, a simplified borrowing from the way the I Ching is consulted.

The book was shortlisted for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the year Esi Edugyan won it for Washington Black. It was also selected as a book of the year by several publications.

The reception was genuinely divided, and it is worth naming both sides with their authors rather than smoothing them into a consensus that did not exist. Dwight Garner in the New York Times and Lara Feigel in the Guardian were among the strongest admirers, Feigel suggesting the book was likely to become the defining literary work on its subject. Sally Rooney, writing in the London Review of Books, read it as a philosophical inquiry that takes a life without children seriously as a fulfilled condition rather than as a subtraction. Against that, Elaine Blair in the New York Times Book Review found the narrator’s deliberations airless and self-involved, Christine Smallwood in Harper’s objected to what she called a solipsistic existentialism and to the shapelessness of the form, Alexandra Schwartz in the New Yorker read it as by turns illuminating and exasperating, and the Kirkus notice was a straightforward dismissal. Those are not misreadings to be corrected. They are the other half of the record.

One availability fact matters for readers here and should be stated plainly rather than assumed. As of this writing, no Japanese edition of Motherhood appears in the National Diet Library catalogue, and Japanese is not among the languages listed on the author’s own site. A reader in Japan who wants the book reads it in English or in another translation. That may change, and if it does the change will not be announced here.

Here is the structural claim this essay rests on, set out in four parts so that it can be argued with rather than absorbed.

The first is that no evidence settles it. There is a research literature comparing people who have children with people who do not, on satisfaction, on income, on health, on how the years after fifty go. It reports averages across populations, and averages are the wrong instrument entirely. An average tells you about a distribution. It cannot tell one woman what her particular life will contain, and the honest use of such findings is that they describe a spread wide enough to include almost any individual outcome. A person looking for the number that decides for her will not find it, because it does not exist.

The second is that no expert has jurisdiction. This is the part that surprises people, because adult life trains us to believe that for every difficult matter there is a professional. There is a doctor who can describe a body and its likely capacities. There is an accountant who can describe a budget. There is nobody at all whose training confers authority over what a person should want her life to consist of. The therapist can help her hear herself; she cannot supply the answer, and a therapist who supplied one would be exceeding her role. The question is not underserved by expertise. It is outside its scope.

The third is that the counterfactual cannot be sampled. Nearly every serious decision permits some version of a trial: a visit before the move, a contract before the permanent post, a separation before the divorce. This one permits nothing of the kind. A person cannot spend a provisional year as a mother and return the outcome. She cannot live the other life alongside this one for comparison. Whichever she chooses, the alternative becomes permanently unavailable for inspection, which means that the question of whether she chose correctly can never be answered even in retrospect. This Library has argued elsewhere, in an essay on regret, that regret runs on borrowed knowledge — that it compares an actual life against an imagined one which was never audited. The point applies here with unusual force, because in this case the imagined life is not merely unaudited. It is unauditable.

The fourth is that the deadline is not chosen. Almost every other open question in adult life can be left open. This one closes on its own. Clinical guidance describes fertility as declining with age at a population level: the joint committee opinion of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, published in 2014, states that fecundity decreases gradually from roughly the early thirties and more rapidly after the late thirties. That is a population-level description written for clinicians. It is not a prediction about any individual, individual variation is very large, it says nothing about any reader of this page, and nothing in this essay is advice about anybody’s body or timing. It is cited here for one narrow purpose: to establish that the closing of the window is a fact about biology and not a social convention, which means the pressure of the date is not something that can be reasoned away.

Put the four together and the shape is unusual. A question that evidence cannot settle, that no authority can adjudicate, whose alternative cannot be tested, and which nonetheless must be answered by a date the person did not select. There are not many decisions like that. It deserves a name, and this essay calls it a decision with no procedure.

Now the device makes a different kind of sense.

The two easy dismissals are that the coins are a gimmick, a way of making a diary look like a form, and that they are an abdication, a writer pretending that chance can carry a responsibility she does not want. Both were made in print. Neither survives contact with what the device actually does on the page, which is not to decide anything.

What chance supplies is an interlocutor. Heti has described the process as a way of continuing to be in dialogue while being alone, and has drawn a distinction between that and an interview, on the grounds that an interview requires an audience interested in the person being interviewed, whereas here there was nothing on the other side that was more interesting than she was. That sounds modest and it is precise. The coins are not a source. They are a second party with no content, and their entire function is to make a monologue into an exchange.

Why would anybody need that? Because a question with no procedure has a characteristic failure mode, which is that it never becomes a question. It stays a mood. A person carrying it for years does not ask it and answer it; she circles it, tolerates it, notices it at weddings and hospital visits and then puts it down. To flip a coin, you have to have formulated something a coin can respond to. The device forces a shapeless preoccupation to declare itself in a form that admits a yes or a no, over and over, hundreds of times, on aspects of the question the asker would never otherwise have separated out.

The critics divided on exactly this, and the disagreement is more useful than either position alone. Writing in the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz suggested that the coins arose from the narrator’s partner declining to engage with the question, which reads the device as a substitute for a conversation that should have happened between two people. Lauren Oyler, writing in the Baffler, rejected that reading and treated the coins as an organising principle deliberately chosen — noting that a child is also an organising principle for a life, and that the formal parallel is the point. This Library does not adjudicate between them, and does not need to. What the argument exposes is the real question underneath: whether a formal constraint can be a genuine method of thought, or whether it is always decoration laid over thinking that was going to happen anyway.

One detail tilts that question, and it is the reason the note at the front of the book matters. The tosses were real. Which means the writer bound herself to outcomes she did not control and had to write through the ones she did not want. A device you can override is a decoration. A device you have committed to in advance is a constraint, and constraints are among the oldest working methods in art precisely because they produce material that preference would have filtered out.

It is worth being exact about what such a device can do, because the exaggerated version of the claim is easy to make and is false.

A coin has no information. It knows nothing about the asker, her circumstances, her partner or her body, and no sequence of tosses will ever contain a fact. Anybody who believes a coin can tell her something about her life is mistaken, and this essay is not making a case for divination.

What the operation can do is narrower and older than the book. It has long been observed, well before this novel and in contexts that have nothing to do with it, that the useful moment in tossing a coin is not the result but the reaction to the result — the half second in which a person discovers she is disappointed, or relieved, and learns something she could not have reached by introspection. The coin generates a stimulus. The information comes entirely from the person.

That is a real operation, and it is also a limited one. It works on small and single questions. It does not scale to a decision that has to hold for decades, and a reaction in a half second is evidence about a mood and not a mandate. Nothing in this essay recommends that any reader decide anything by chance, and a reader who takes that from these pages has taken the opposite of what is written here.

The book itself is not proposing the method either, as far as its published account of itself goes. The coins structure a text. They do not conclude it. And there is a difference between a device that works on a page — where the writer can keep the record, publish the failures and be paid for the difficulty — and a method for a life, where none of those conditions hold. An essay that blurred the two would be doing the reader a disservice.

The book is at its sharpest not on the decision but on everything that surrounds it, and several of its admirers located the value there. Maggie Doherty in the New Republic described it as a rare account of a woman declining to treat motherhood as the defining event of her life, and Sally Rooney read it as taking a childless life seriously as a life rather than as an absence. That is the second movement of the book, and it is where its observations are most transferable.

Start with how the question is asked. It arrives, over and over, in social settings, from people with no standing to receive an answer, phrased as though an answer were owed. It is asked at weddings, at work, by relatives, by near strangers, and it is asked as small talk, which is the part that does the damage. A question about whether a person intends to reproduce is treated as being of the same conversational weight as a question about her holiday plans. The asker is usually not hostile. That is precisely why it is difficult to decline: there is no rudeness to point at, and refusing to answer is itself legible as an answer.

Then notice the difference in cost between the two available replies. Not yet is cheap. It preserves the asker’s picture of how a life goes, defers the matter to an unspecified future, and closes the exchange without anyone having to think. No is expensive. It requires the listener to revise a model, and a revision invites argument: the reasons are requested, the reasons are evaluated, the woman is reassured that she will change her mind, and the conversation that was supposed to be small talk becomes a defence. So not yet gets said by a great many people who do not mean it, and the strategic value of remaining publicly undecided is one of the reasons the real distribution of these decisions is invisible.

Then notice how a woman without children is read. Her life is interpreted backwards from the fact, as though everything in it were a consequence of an answer. Achievement becomes compensation. Pleasure becomes distraction. Freedom becomes something she will regret, stated with confidence by people who have no way of knowing. The same interpretive move is not applied to a woman with children, whose other activities are not routinely read as substitutes for something missing.

And underneath all of it is the structural oddity this essay wants to name: a decision that is nobody else’s business is nonetheless treated as a matter of public interest. Nobody claims the right to make it. Everybody claims the right to have a view about it, to ask about it, to be told, and to be mildly disappointed. Those two things are not consistent, and the inconsistency is not an accident.

A word about the ground this is read on, stated carefully, because the usual framing is one this Library refuses.

This publication does not treat a national birth rate as a scoreboard. It does not regard a woman without children as a shortfall, a symptom, a problem for policy or a person who has failed to contribute. No figure of that kind appears in this essay, and the omission is deliberate rather than an oversight. A reader will not find her own life converted into an aggregate here.

But there is one verifiable fact about the ground worth putting on the page, and it is a statute rather than a statistic. The Basic Act on Measures for Society with Decreasing Birthrate, Act No. 133 of 2003, promulgated on 30 July of that year, opens with a preamble that says, in effect, that of course marriage and childbirth rest on individual decision — and then continues with a however, going on to declare that halting the decline is something strongly required of us now. Its Article 2 sets out the basic principles, and the fourth paragraph of that article provides that measures in every field, social, economic, educational and cultural, must be taken with regard to the declining-birthrate situation.

Read that sentence structure again, because the structure is the finding. The private character of the decision is conceded in a subordinate clause and then set aside by the main one. Nobody is compelled. Nothing in the Act tells any woman what to do, and it would be a serious misreading to suggest otherwise. What it does is instruct an entire apparatus to treat the aggregate of private answers as a matter it must have regard to, which means that the atmosphere in which the question gets asked at a family dinner is not a neutral atmosphere. It has an official position behind it, and the official position has been stated in the only place where a society writes down what it actually thinks.

None of which makes this a worse place to decide in than anywhere else, and that comparison is not being offered. Heti’s book is Canadian and describes the same pressure with a different accent, from a society with its own anxious commentary about who is having children and who is not. What differs between places is not the existence of the pressure but the vocabulary available for describing it, and a book that supplies a vocabulary is useful in a language that has not developed its own — which is one reason the absence of a Japanese edition is worth noting rather than shrugging at.

This chamber has approached the territory four times, and this piece is only worth publishing if it starts where those stopped.

Our reading of Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void follows a woman who invents a pregnancy in order to be allowed to leave the office at five, and argues that the book is not a caper: motherhood is the only claim on a woman’s time that the culture is obliged to acknowledge, and reaching for it is an indictment of the shelf, not a triumph. That essay is about the uses of the claim. This one is about the decision the claim refers to, which is a different object entirely.

Our essay on Kate Chopin’s The Awakening argues that the scandal of that novel was never the adultery but the unease produced by a woman wanting a life of her own without being able to say what it was for, and that a capacity to feel arriving before the conditions for using it is a worse position than numbness. That is about wanting something unnamed. Heti’s narrator has the opposite problem: her question is perfectly well named and still cannot be answered.

Our piece on single parenting and a romantic life argues that the binding constraint on a single mother’s intimate life is not stigma but arithmetic — hours, childcare, an unbreakable return time. Set that beside this essay and notice that the constraint here is of a different type. Heti’s narrator is not short of hours or money or standing. Everything the arithmetic essay identified as binding has been lifted, and the question is no easier, because the difficulty was never resource scarcity.

And this Library published recently on Maggie Gyllenhaal’s The Lost Daughter, on a mother’s ambivalence and the absence of any socially available sentence for loving your children and having wanted your life back. That essay and this one are adjacent and must not be run together, so the boundary is stated here rather than left to be inferred. That one is about after. This one is about before. A woman deciding is not in the position of a woman who has decided, and nothing in either essay transfers across the line: nothing here predicts what either answer will feel like on the other side, and nothing there says anything about how to arrive at an answer. The two pieces share a subject and not a situation, and treating a report from after as guidance for before is one of the commonest ways this conversation goes wrong.

Four objections are worth taking at full strength, and the last of them is the one this essay cannot answer.

The first concerns the narrator. To a substantial group of readers the claustrophobic self-attention is exactly the point: the pressure being described is relentless and interior, and a book that rendered it from a comfortable distance would be describing something else. Lauren Oyler made a version of that defence, arguing that the narrowness is representative rather than narcissistic. To an equally substantial group, including Elaine Blair and Christine Smallwood, the same quality is the flaw, and the book is airless, repetitive and insufficiently interested in anything outside one consciousness. This essay does not adjudicate, and it should not be assumed that the negative readings are failures of comprehension. A book can be about interiority and still be tiresome to read, tedium is a real property of prose, and a reader who finds three hundred pages of circling unbearable has not misunderstood anything.

The second concerns the device, and here the objection is sharper than the gimmick charge. It is that the coins are an evasion of responsibility dressed as method. On this reading, a procedure that never produces a decision but continuously produces the appearance of rigorous engagement is the ideal instrument for someone who does not want to choose: it generates text, it generates the feeling of work, and it guarantees that nothing is ever concluded and nobody is ever accountable for a conclusion. And the objection extends directly to this essay, which is the uncomfortable part. Arguing that the coins dramatise genuine undecidability is precisely what a sophisticated defence of avoidance would look like, and there is no test available from outside that distinguishes the two. The most this essay can say is that the distinction it draws — between a question that is hard and a question that has no procedure — is one a reader can apply to her own case and reject.

The third concerns privilege, and it is conceded without qualification. Deliberating at length requires things many women do not have: years to spend, money, health, reliable contraception and access to termination, a legal position, a partner who will wait or the freedom to proceed without one, and work that tolerates the uncertainty. Oyler noted this in the book’s defence rather than against it, observing that the luxury of an open question is itself political. Both are true at once. A woman for whom the decision was made by circumstance, by a partner, by an employer, by a law, by money or by a body that did not cooperate is not in the position this book describes, and she may reasonably find three hundred pages of open deliberation a description of a comfort she was never offered. Nothing in this essay applies to her situation, and nothing in it should be read as suggesting that deliberation is the normal or superior form of the experience. It is one form, available to some people, and the book is a document of that form and not of the general case.

The fourth is the one with no answer. An essay that praises undecidability offers nothing to a woman who has to choose, and probably by a date she can name. She does not need to be told that the question has no procedure; she is the person who found that out. Being informed that her difficulty is structural rather than personal does not extend a deadline, produce a partner, or make the two imagined lives any easier to see. That objection is correct and this essay concedes it entirely. What remains is smaller than comfort and is the only honest offer available: the argument removes one false explanation. It does not make the decision easier, but it may stop a person concluding that her inability to resolve the question is evidence of a defect in her — a failure of nerve, of self-knowledge, of maturity. It is not. It is what an undecidable question feels like from the inside, and a great many capable, decisive people are in exactly the same position and have concluded the same wrong thing about themselves.

A declaration, made where it can be checked against the argument rather than tucked underneath it.

This house sells private companionship, and it has no interest in the answer a reader arrives at. That is unusual enough to state plainly: almost everybody who asks a woman this question wants one of the two answers, and a business that is indifferent to both is in a rare position. It would be easy to write from here that an evening away from the pressure helps a person think clearly, and that sentence is not written, because it is not a claim that could be supported.

What an evening cannot be is a place to decide. Nobody here has standing over the question, for the same reason nobody anywhere does, and a companion who offered a view would be doing something outside what was purchased. This house does not counsel, does not advise, and holds no position on whether any person should have a child.

What it can be is a few hours in which the question is not asked. That is a small and concrete thing and it is stated at its real size. It is not therapy, it is not clarity, it is not perspective, and it does not constitute progress on anything.

And the objection against ourselves, which belongs here rather than in a footnote: a business that sells hours of not being asked has an interest in the asking continuing. Relief from a pressure is a product only while the pressure exists, and that is a genuine conflict which declaring it does not dissolve. The most that can be done about it is to refuse the outcome claims that would make the product larger, and to say, as this essay has, that what is on offer is bounded, paid for, and not a solution to anything described in these pages.

This essay gives no advice to any reader about her own decision. It does not diagnose anybody, it passes no verdict on any woman’s choice in either direction, and it does not hold that either answer is better, braver, more responsible or more free than the other. A reader who wants a child, a reader who does not, and a reader who does not know are all being described here and none is being assessed.

It does not claim a fresh critical reading of the book. Every statement about the form of Motherhood, its coin device and its front note is attributed to its publishers, to Sheila Heti’s published remarks in interview, or to published criticism, and the evidence ledger records which is which. No passage of the book is quoted at length anywhere.

The critical reception is reported as divided because it was. Admirers and detractors are named with their outlets, the negative readings are given as serious positions rather than as errors, and no view is attributed to any critic beyond what that critic published.

The clinical material is narrow and limited. The joint committee opinion of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine describes fertility decline at a population level for a clinical audience. It is not a prediction about any individual, individual variation is wide, guidance of this kind is revised over time and differs between bodies, and nothing here is guidance about any reader’s body, timing or options. Anybody with a question about her own circumstances should raise it with a clinician, which is a statement about where authority lies and not a recommendation about what to do.

The statute is cited for what its text says and for nothing else. No birth rate, fertility rate or demographic projection appears in this essay. Nothing here treats a declining birth rate as a problem a reader is implicated in, and nothing treats a life without children as a deficit, a symptom or an incomplete version of another life.

Publication details, edition dates and prize listings are taken from publisher and prize records rather than from inspection of physical copies, and the absence of a Japanese edition reflects a catalogue search made on the date of writing, which may since have changed.

Neither Sheila Heti, nor her publishers, nor any critic, researcher, professional body or public institution named in this essay has any connection to this house, knows of it, or endorses it. Their work is described here as published work and nothing more.