Ejaculated is a tough word to place in a novel, these days. Nobody uses it to describe dialogue any more and in a sexual context it seems a little functional. Also, for technical reasons, it is tricky to employ from a female point of view. So the reader really does notice when Sheila Heti’s narrator says that something has been ejaculated into her “by the universe” and that something, which is now “spreading all the way through her, the way cum feels”, is the spirit of her much-loved, just‑dead father. But each to her own – you have to admire the leap.
I was pulled into Pure Colour, Heti’s follow-up to 2018’s Motherhood, by a description of life before the internet that held a nostalgia I needed to name. Mira begins the novel in a world now lost to us: it was a time when choice was limited and things stayed particular. This was before seasons became “postmodern”, before we knew that “there were so many ways of being hated, and one could be hated by so many people”. In those days you could see a certain lamp in a shop and know it was your favourite lamp of all time, and “your friends were simply who was around”.
