Heti

We spark ideas off each other and it's perhaps because our work is so different – Heti's world is colour and textiles – she has just set up a fair-trade business selling beautiful clothes dyed in a tiny Indian village close to Jaipur.

Friends who became stepsisters 2011

Heti and I got on so well that rather than us having to go round the street our parents had a little green wooden door built in the adjoining back wall.

Friends who became stepsisters 2011

Perhaps it helped that Heti was my best friend before she became my stepsister when we were both six.

Friends who became stepsisters 2011

We were stepsisters, and that meant that Heti had to put up with me and my older sister arriving to join her and her older sister and brother every Wednesday and every other weekend.

Friends who became stepsisters 2011

And in the same way Heti suggests that good writers don't think about what makes for "memorable characters" when they're creating them, it's likely they don't think much about what makes a story "engaging" or dialogue "superb" or a sense of time or place "transporting," either.

Writing and Publishing 2010

Heti has a wonderfully relaxing, calm personality and perhaps because we have known each other all our lives, I feel completely at ease with her and think she feels the same way.

Friends who became stepsisters 2011

In an interview at Condalmo with Sheila Heti, author of the underappreciated novel Ticknor, Heti says this about "character":

Writing and Publishing 2010

Meanwhile, Heti has started collecting recollections of John McCain.

Daily Digest: Dreaming Of The Candidates 2008

Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day.

WORKIN' FOR A LIVIN' TEV 2008

Heti seamlessly inhabits Ticknor's fussy 19th-century diction with a feat of virtuoso ventriloquism that puts one in mind of The Remains of the Day.

THE TWO MR. BANVILLES TEV 2008