Hello, this is everything else, the FT Culture Podcast. I'm Grizz, a commissioning editor on the arts desk.

So we're back, and this time on a Friday.

On today's episode, we're going to take a short walk along the River Thames from the

FTs London offices to tape modern.

But we're not going to meet an artist there, we're going to meet one of my favourite writers,

Sheila Hetty.

Sheila Hetty writes the kind of stories that take place as much in the character's heads

as they do in the outside world of plot.

And novels like these, where the action, where the most interesting stuff, is really

in these thoughts and feelings, are some of my favourite books.

When I first read her novel,

How Should a Person Be? A Few Years ago, I was hooked. How Should a Person Be is subtitled,

a novel from life, and it plays really interestingly with this boundary between fiction and real life.

It's a kind of freewheeling, episodic coming of age tale, written from a writer's point of view. It's a really great kind of meditation on friendships about how friends shape each other,

particularly when you're in your 20s, and also where we draw the boundaries in our relationships.

Sheila Hetty published her first book, The Middle Stories, when she was just 24.

She's now in her early 40s, and she published a book last year called Motherhood.

Like How Should a Person Be, the book Motherhood takes, as its starting point, a question,

should I have a child?

And also, what does it mean not have a child?

I was really surprised, actually, when I saw that Sheila was coming all the way to London from Toronto to see an

exhibition at Tate Modern of paintings by the French artist Pierre Bonar, because as far as I knew,

...