On the second day of my sojourn in Innsbruck, I came upon an inviting bookshop called Haymon in Innsbruck, thanks to our friend Anton, who suggested we grab a coffee there post-lunch. Haymon is large, elegantly designed in monochromatic hues, and features a fabulous range of titles in German translation, in original German, as well as a selection of contemporary works in English. It’s not quite a cafe, it has one table with four chairs where one could hang out either alone or with a friend over a hot drink. I like the intimacy of it, and the sheer range. It’s not your typical bookshop which mainly stocks bestsellers; boasting, instead, a more eclectic collection for the more intellectually inclined. I returned to the shop on my own some days later and chanced upon Sheila Heti’s novel—Motherhood. It was above my reach, but I asked the caretaker to fetch it for me. I wanted to read a few pages before deciding whether to buy it or not.

In the beginning there was a note about a technique used by people who consult I Ching, a 3,000-year-old Chinese-origin divination system involving flipping three coins. This system is used throughout the book, which hinted at the narrator’s potential indecisiveness. At first I found it annoying. It seemed like a cop-out, a cheap trick for furthering a narrative. Ask a series of profound-sounding questions that involve the word soul and get chance answers that preempt the next question. At the book’s core, however, is the female narrator’s own contempt towards her inability to decide whether to embrace motherhood or persist in her rejection of it. She is partnered, but with someone who has already been a father and who isn’t particularly keen on repeating the experience. It’s up to her, he says, and the rest of the book is essentially an unfurling of her subjectivity as someone who simply cannot make up her mind. I wondered if the book’s premise seemed more irritating than empowering, and if perhaps it wasn’t worth my time, until I realised I had already read about 21 pages and was keen to continue.