Sheila Heti on Boarding Schools and the Mind of a Writer

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This week’s story, “The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea,” is about a girls’ school that takes to the North Atlantic Ocean aboard a ship during a time of war. When did this premise first come to you? Did it arrive fully formed or start with a single image or episode or character?

I guess it came fully formed. I had a dream last spring about a girls’ school on a ship. I went to a girls’ school in Toronto called St. Clement’s for a good part of my childhood (from grade four until the end of grade nine), and I think I always imagined that one day I might write about a girls’ school. Somehow seeing the school on a ship suddenly made that possible. When I was little, I used to stay home from school, pretending to be sick, and I would draw all the different girls who would be in my future book, giving them different hair colors and naming them, which was the best part. I never had a story, just the girls and their personalities.

The principal of St. Alwynn’s, Madame Ghislaine, came up with the idea, and she persuaded the principal of a boys’ school to follow suit. The schools are on separate ships, but they are supposed to meet at sea once a month. Many of the girls spend much of their time thinking about the boys. Is that inevitable at an all-girls’ school, whether at sea or on land?

I don’t know. Actually, I don’t remember thinking about boys that much. Some of the other girls did, and I found them slightly terrifying and really mature. One of my best friends from my former school went “boy crazy” in sixth grade, and I was really upset about it. Because I didn’t really know any boys my age, boys seemed exotic, far away, unknowable, and kind of beside the point. For me, the romance was among the girls. In my story, their crushes and fantasies are not so much about the boys; they’re like objects the girls can hold on to, and talk about, and share with one another, in order to be in relation to each other in various, intimate ways.

The girls have been preparing for a talent show, but once it’s announced that the boys’ ship can no longer make it, they—and, somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, their headmistress—believe that it is pointless. Why did you decide that Madame Ghislaine would cancel the show?

I don’t know! I probably didn’t feel like writing a talent show.

One of the girls, Dani, has entered into a correspondence with a boy named Sebastien, whom she’d met at a dance. It’s the first time that she’s had a crush on a boy. Did you draw on your own memories when you were thinking about Dani’s feelings? What does the epistolary form give the nascent relationship?

I remember being set up with a boy at a grade-seven dance. He was the shortest boy in his grade, and I was the shortest girl in mine. Our friends were certain we’d be happy to dance together, but he was unhappy and so was I.

I have a friend named Alice who is the same age as the girls in the story, and, around the time I had the dream about the ship, she and I went out for sushi, as we do a few times a year, and she was telling me about her most recent crush. I wrote the story soon after. Memories of the many crushes I’ve had came into it, but her intensity—our dinner conversation was entirely about her crush—really fuelled the story.

As for letters, it’s rare to get them through the mail, though I still do sometimes, and I have a whole suitcase full of them from the nineties, when I regularly corresponded with friends that way. Letters are so special. They contain a whole person. In my story, mail was the only way I could think of for Dani and Sebastien to be in touch.

One girl, Lorraine, has absolutely no interest in the obsession with boys. She watches the nightly news and tries to tell the others what’s happening in the war. She pores over maps—“For her, a map wasn’t a meaningless muddle: it was wars and territories built from men’s passions”—and dreams of being a diplomat. She doesn’t always seem the most diplomatic of characters! But could she hold her own at the negotiating table?

I don’t know. The way Lorraine describes the diplomatic personality doesn’t seem like her at all. But, then, I have no idea what sort of person succeeds at the negotiating table. Maybe she’d be good.

Sebastien already has a girlfriend, someone he’s known since kindergarten. But Dani learns that he’s been writing to another girl on the ship, which upsets her deeply. How introspective is Dani? Does this force her to look more closely at herself and her own sense of morality?

I think it does. Dani isn’t drawn to introspection. She is someone who likes to act, to make things happen, who prefers not to think, because, if she thought, it would get in the way of acting. This may be the first time she’s followed a train of thought to the end. Usually, she’s the one creating everyone’s reality—coming up with the rules and games—so it’s particularly startling and uncomfortable for her to learn that someone else might create a reality, too.

Do you think you’ll write more about St. Alwynn’s and life aboard the ship? Would you go into any more detail about the war?

I might write more. This story was already carved from something longer. When I started writing about these girls last spring, I was imagining it might become a book. Then, when I turned it into a story, it felt like it was done. Then after I was done turning it into a story I started wanting it to be a novel again. Now I’m curious to see whether publishing it will make me feel like the project has ended, or whether it will make me excited to write more.

As for expanding upon the war, I hadn’t imagined going into more detail about it! But I like that idea, even if part of what was fun about writing this story was focussing on the sorts of details that those who like war stories would find trivial and exasperating.

The story can sometimes seem as though it’s set in the forties or fifties, but at other times the references are far more contemporary. Do you think about it as taking place in a particular era, or do you want it to exist in its own time?

Along with writing about the St. Alwynn girls, I’ve also been working on a book using dialogues with an A.I. chatbot (the same chatbot I used to write “According to Alice”). It’s made me think about the kind of fiction that computers might write one day, which has made me cherish ever more the fact that each individual human is characterized by unique gaps and fascinations and stupidities. While an A.I. could be fed all the information in the world, humans can only absorb a limited amount. Though I’ve always been interested in the limitations of the human mind, working with A.I. makes me even more fascinated with our limitations—how they define us and are beautiful.

This brings me to what era the story takes place in: I think it takes place in the era of my mind. To me, at heart, fiction is a portrait of the writer’s mind, and the mind of an individual is its own place, with its own references, which all exist simultaneously, despite what era they come from. My mind includes references to Kurt Vonnegut, to Prince, to Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, and to whatever era stories about girls’ boarding schools take place in—the Second World War, whenever. If all of one’s references and imaginings about life float on the same plane in the mind, maybe they can all appear on the same plane of a story?

Perhaps relatedly, I’ve been trying to see everyone who is alive at the same time as part of the same generation. It really works, and, once you get used to it, it’s kind of amazing. I think I’m interested in expanding my sense of what the present moment is. A moment doesn’t have to be a single year. It can be a hundred-year time span.

How much did you think about the logistics of the floating boarding school? Did you get out a map and track its voyage and that of the boys’ ship? Should we assume there’s quite a strong degree of fictional license?

I mostly just used place names that I liked, that came to mind as I was writing whichever sentence, and that sounded beautiful to me. During the copy edit, you and I went back and forth a bit about this, and I did look at a map, and make a few little adjustments, but mostly I left it as I wrote it. Looking at the map, I was surprised to see that the route I had charted in the first draft wasn’t more implausible. I’m pretty bad at geography.

When I was a girl, I read countless books set in boarding schools—Enid Blyton’s “Malory Towers” and “St. Clare’s” series, for example, or Elinor Brent-Dyer’s “Chalet School” novels. I have no idea what I’d think if I were to read them again today! Did you have any of those kinds of childhood books in mind?

Oh, yes! I was definitely thinking about all the boarding-school books I loved as a girl. Noel Streatfeild was one of my favorite writers. Her “Ballet Shoes” may or may not have been set in a boarding school, but it was definitely about girls in a school, and I loved her “Gemma” series, about a child actress. I think Gemma was the inspiration for Audrey. I also still have my copy of Susan Coolidge’s “What Katy Did at School.”

I wonder if boarding-school books are so satisfying to us as children, in part, because they got rid of the parents without killing them? Or was it the fantasy of an endless sleepover? Or was it because it took away everything most extraneous about life and left only the thrill of being in relation to one’s enemies and friends? There was such a claustrophobic sense of life in those books, but this claustrophobia also felt safe.

Coincidentally, I started reading “Never Let Me Go” by Kazuo Ishiguro during our edits—another boarding-school novel, in its way, although I didn’t know that about it going in. What a perfect, mysterious, and beautiful book. I love it so much!

I was at a literary event in New York a few years ago—the first big gathering after the lockdowns started to be lifted—and Ishiguro was being honored. He was in England, and they projected a live stream of him on a large screen in front of the whole room. Everyone at the event was dressed very formally, and one of the first things Ishiguro did was sweetly apologize to the room for being in a T-shirt. He said that he’d wanted to wear a tuxedo, but his wife told him that it would be absurd for him to be wearing a tuxedo, sitting in his own living room.

I think about that all the time. There was something so boyish about him, so tender, so wanting to go along with the audience and his wife, unsurely, but gladly, taking cues from the outside world. Finishing “Never Let Me Go,” I thought about how the heartbreaking tone of the book was also the tone of his tender apology, and about how ultimately when we love a writer it’s because we love their soul, which is also a tone, and how this can’t be copied by anyone, and, although it can be cultivated by the author, it can’t be made up, and it seeps into everything they do, in ways the writer isn’t even aware of.

I had a moment of wondering if he went to a boarding school, but it turns out he didn’t.

Would you have wanted to sail aboard the ship as a teen-ager?

Not if they cancelled the talent show! ♦