Women in Clothes (Heti)

Author Bios

Sheila Heti
• Birth—25 December 1976
• Where—Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Education—University of Toronto; National Theater School of Canada
• Currently—lives in Toronto


Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer and editor. She was born in Toronto, Canada, as the child of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. She studied art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto and playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada. She works as Interviews Editor at The Believer where she herself conducts interviews regularly. She previoiusly wrote a column on acting for Maisonneuve. Her brother is the comedian David Heti, a stand-up comedian.

Books
Heti's short story collection, The Middle Stories, was published in 2001, when she was twenty-four

Her novel, Ticknor, was released in 2005. The novel's main characters are based on real people: William Hickling Prescott and George Ticknor, although the facts of their lives are altered.

The Chairs are Where The People Go, published in 2011, was co-written with her friend, Misha Glouberman. The New Yorker called it "a triumph of conversational philosophy" and named it one of the Best Books of 2011.

Heti describes her 2010 book How Should a Person Be? as a constructed reality, based on recorded interviews with her friends, particularly the painter Margaux Williamson. The New York Times selected it as one of the 100 Best Books of 2012, and James Wood of The New Yorker also considered it one of the best books of the year.

In a 2007 interview with Dave Hickey for The Believer, she commented:

Increasingly I'm less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just can't do it.

Extras
• Heti is the creator of Trampoline Hall, a popular monthly lecture series based in Toronto and New York, at which people speak on subjects outside their areas of expertise. The New Yorker praised the series for "celebrating eccentricity and do-it-yourself inventiveness." It has sold out every show since its inception in December 2001.

• For the early part of 2008, Heti kept a blog called The Metaphysical Poll, where she posted the sleeping dreams people were having about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton during the 2008 primary season, which readers sent in.

• Heti was an actress as a child, and as a teenager appeared in shows directed by Hillar Liitoja, the founder and Artistic Director of the experiemental DNA Theatre. Heti appears in Margaux Williamson's 2010 film, Teenager Hamlet.

• Heti plays Lenore Doolan in Leanne Shapton's book, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry

• In November 2013, Jordan Tannahill directed Heti's play All Our Happy Days are Stupid at Toronto's Videofag. Heti's decade-long struggle to write the play is a primary plot element in her book How Should a Person Be? (From the publisher.)