Everything is Great (ft. Sheila Heti)

Our Struggle

We're still alive! And at the incessant nagging of the Our Struggle Office of Diversity and Inclusion, joined by Canadian woman writer Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood, and the newly out PURE COLOUR (note the canadian spelling). This was a great episode - we didn't talk about Knausgaard so much (although Sheila had a good story about hanging with the man at an Australian continental breakfast), or even Craft (although there was some craft chat), but you all know the drill by now -- the pleasure is in the digression etc. Thanks so much to our new friend Sheila for coming on the show! Look forward to hanging in Toronto soon with Margaret, Alice and the whole gang<3

cheat sheet:

0:00 - What have L&D been up to during the hiatus? Drew almost died of food poisoning in Israel and Lauren got in trouble with the P*rk Sl*pe F*od C*op

6:58 - Sheila comes on the line and tells us about getting locked out of her friend Margaux's studio, her 140-pound Rottweiler called Feldman, and her experimental theater adolescence

32:38 - Lauren and Sheila discuss a devastating book Sheila recently wrote about in NYRB, the Swedish author Lena Andersson's WILLFUL DISREGARD, which is full of wise aphorisms about love and human behavior. This leads to a discussion of aphoristic writing, about which Lauren has recently come to have a bee in her bonnet. How can we know aphorisms we write are not complete bullshit? Lauren wants to know, and Sheila and Drew reasonably point out that readers are not expecting authors to have access to a universal truth. But we get into a interesting convo about if it's possible to deceive yourself in writing and also get into the brilliant and (to Lauren) frustrating psychoanalytic writer Adam Phillips, whose book MISSING OUT Sheila recommends.

58:15 - A comment about a (fanciful) description of a certain literary critic friend of the pod's scrotum in PURE COLOUR leads into a passionate discussion of male circumcision, a topic about which Sheila has lately been having complicated feelings.

1:17:36 - Drew, Sheila and Lauren have a very Jewish discussion of their formative encounters with Woody Allen films and Sheila reveals that she was almost named Woody Allen Heti.

1:42:43 - [DISCOURSE ALERT] Sheila bravely reveal a PRO-ROONEY stance

Thanks so much again to Sheila !!

As always, you can keep Lauren from starving by buying a mug at ourstruggle.store.

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As they (are legally obligated) say in Montreal: A bientot!