Heti, Sheila, 1976-....

Sheila Heti is a writer who was born into a Jewish-Hungarian family in 1976 and grew up in Toronto, Canada. Heti first discovered feminism and the Riot Grrrl movement when she was around 15 or 16 through reading Sassy magazine, Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, and Lynn Crosbie's The Girl Wants To. At a lecture by Wolf in Toronto, Heti spoke during the Q+A about how her own zines ("Iron Maiden"), which she had been putting up around the school, had been torn down by school authorities. She gave an envelope of the zines to Wolf after the talk. Several weeks later, Heti received a letter from Wolf's publicist at Random House, Susan Roxborough, suggesting that they meet to discuss a possible anthology of writing by young women. Heti began soliciting material from all across North America, writing to English teachers at schools and putting out the word through the zine network by exchanging her new zine ("Brillantine") for the zines she received. After about a year and a half of work, she handed in a first draft of the book. It was rejected because the material was too controversial.

Heti studied playwriting at the National Theatre School in Montreal before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. In 2001, she created the Trampoline Hall lecture series (hosted by Misha Glouberman). Heti has published five books, including the novels Ticknor and How Should a Person Be? and the story collection The Middle Stories. Her books have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Italian and Serbian. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The London Review of Books, n+1, McSweeney’s, Bookforum, and other places.

From the guide to the Sheila Heti Riot Grrrl Collection, 1994-1997, (© 2012 Fales Library and Special Collections)