[In Press] Sheila Heti, Melanie Klein, and motherhood

Sheila Heti, in her approach to motherhood, as orientated around intergenerational matrilineal relationships, models many of Melanie Klein’s ideas about the mother being at the heart of an individual’s identity. I read Motherhood as both autofiction and a testimony of Heti’s experience of being mothered, which was shaped by her own mother’s inherited trauma. I argue Heti’s deep ambivalence toward motherhood and her uncertainty about her desire to be a mother, is a projection of the problematic bond with her own mother. Motherhood makes an important contribution to the genre of autofiction in linking the significance of the symbolic mother to making claims on one’s own identity, and to the autobiographical genre more broadly by suggesting claims to identity are intimately linked to the mother. In returning to the bond with her mother and enacting this reparation through writing Motherhood, Heti demonstrates the centrality of the maternal bond to the individual’s sense of self, also demonstrating Klein’s idea that the subject must separate from the mother and achieve a separate identity. As Heti demonstrates, the writing of autofiction can be a means through which this separateness is attained.