On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. The result, a kind of diary of a divided mind, serves as both a record of that deliberation and an insurance policy against an adverse outcome, by guaranteeing that Heti’s struggle to understand and obey the mandate of her soul will end, either way, in a birth, even if what is born is made of ink and paper rather than of flesh and blood. In the course of nearly three hundred pages, Heti examines and cross-examines herself to decide whether or not she should have a child before it is too late. “Interrogator” might be the better word, since, in place of telling a story, the novel asks a question. Heti’s narrator, who seems all but indistinguishable from Heti herself, calls it, at various points, “a book to prevent future tears,” “a prophylactic,” “a written defence,” and “a wrestling place.” Even “narrator” seems an awkward term here. Like her breakthrough book, the formally freewheeling “How Should a Person Be?,” “Motherhood” is a novel, or so its publisher claims, though even that loose and accommodating category doesn’t convey the weird originality of this sometimes exasperating, sometimes illuminating work.

I can do what I like.” Once again, she has.

In “ Motherhood” (Henry Holt), Sheila Heti writes, “My mother often says, You are free. In “ A Life’s Work,” a 2001 memoir of becoming a mother, Rachel Cusk writes that after her daughter’s birth her “appetite for the world was insatiable, omnivorous, an expression of longing for some lost, pre-maternal self, and for the freedom that self had perhaps enjoyed, perhaps squandered.” Nothing is freer than squandering freedom-at least, that’s what I tell myself when I wonder if I’m making the best use of what may remain of mine.

Each of those new phases yielded more degrees of autonomy, but motherhood works the opposite way. Yet that’s doubtless how I will think of this time if I become a mother: as a finite, departed “before” that gave way to an ever after, just as childhood molted into adolescence, and adolescence ceded to adulthood. If I were asked to describe the stage of life that I occupy now, at the age of thirty, it would not occur to me to say that I am a thus far childless woman of childbearing age.

Sheila heti's how should a person be