Interview: Sheila Heti (excerpt)
by Matthew Tiffany on April 20, 2007
Here’s an excerpt from an interview with Sheila Heti, over at my site.
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M: I’m reading Ticknor for the second time now, and I’m that much more impressed this time through with how you took someone respected in his field, made him largely unsuccessful and thoroughly unlikeable, and then made a very likeable story out of that unlikeable person’s thoughts.
S: Thanks.
M: Early on, Ticknor describes Prescott as a man solidly, stubbornly rooted in the habits of his youth, and then as someone disinterested in recapturing the past. Ticknor seems to have access to a lot of Prescott’s life, before the fame, and would seem to know him quite well, but then we get statements like these, Ticknor contradicting himself, which give the impression that he doesn’t really know him at all.
At some points in the book, Ticknor seems to approach mental illness-levels of personality disorder. Do you see him that way?
S: I think we read literature in a funny way. We try to make sense of it the way we make sense of life, and by this route, look at the characters as though they’re our friends, by which I mean: we gossip about them and cheaply psychoanalyse them. I find this to be a very funny thing to do to a character! In a lot of interviews I’m asked to speculate on Ticknor in this way, as though he is something separate from myself, someone I know, that I can talk about objectively. But of course, he is only my words, my head, my understanding of things, my aesthetic – not a person at all. And so that makes it difficult to say what he’s like much the way that saying what you yourself are like is difficult. It’s stupid to ask an author about their characters, I think.
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