To Lay Your Hand on Reality

Reflections on Sheila Heti's 'Motherhood', Sebald, and photographing the subjective.

The last photograph in Sheila Heti’s Motherhood is strangely familiar. Strange because it shouldn’t be familiar: it shows Heti’s mother — or the narrator of Motherhood’s mother — in medical school. Not even as much as that, actually; we see a sliver of the mother, a nose and a mouth turned down towards her hands, which are engaged in cleaning a scalpel.…