Sheila Heti on the Mystery of Lust

The protagonist of this week’s story, “Earthly Delights,” realizes, at the age of fifteen, that there’s a difference between wanting to be someone’s girlfriend and actually being that person’s girlfriend. Did you set out to explore that gulf in the story?No, the story was actually written for a magazine that commissioned me to write a piece for them about lust. They were doing a series on the seven deadly sins. I figured, since they wanted me to write a story about lust, they probably wanted a lot of sex in it, so I put in as much as I thought would fit the story. The editor replied with a very prim and terse e-mail, saying they were a “family publication” and were not interested in running the story as I had submitted it. I looked up the magazine—it turns out they were a Catholic publicat