The narrator of Sheila Heti's short story 'My Life Is a Joke' is, absurdly enough, dead. She has emerged from her grave to fly across the country to present what seems to be, more or less, a TED talk. In her talk, she wrestles with the one thought "that must be thought all the way through to the end before you find your peace." In her case, this thought is her boyfriend's accusation, shortly before her death, that her life is a joke.


Though the premise of the story is darkly funny (for example, the narrator agrees to give her talk only if the conference organizers will pay to have her dug up), the desperate attempt to resolve a life already misspent is anything but humorous.

Heti's story first appeared in the May 11, 2015, issue of The New Yorker. As of this writing, you can read the story there for free.

The Joke

As the story progresses, we learn that shortly after her boyfriend called her a joke, the narrator committed suicide by stepping in front of a car. In her view, her actions make her the proverbial chicken-who-crossed-the-road, the protagonist in one of the most familiar jokes of all time.

On the one hand, she means this metaphorically. She says:

"What a chicken I was. I couldn't bear any aspect of living."

In this case, the "other side" is death. Too afraid of life, she crossed the road to death.

But she also seems to suggest that in doing so, she quite literally became a joke and turned her life into a joke. Rather than being dismayed by this, she attempts to find hope in it.

Bearing Witness

The narrator mentions a high school boyfriend who thought "the most important thing to have in life was a witness." At the time, the narrator disagreed with his vision of what marriage was for, but she seems to see his point now. She is clearly troubled that she died alone, with no one to witness her passing.

Obviously, her life is over, so it's too late to change the way it was or was not witnessed. But her talk seems to be a convoluted attempt to reframe her boyfriend's insult as a kind of witnessing. According to this logic, he foretold her death, and by foretelling it -- and by recognizing her as the joke she was -- he bore witness to both her life and her death.

In other words, she claims not to be troubled that her life was a joke. Rather, she attempts to take comfort in the accuracy of her boyfriend's observation, as if the accuracy trumps the substance of her life.

Frankly, though, she seems to protest too much, as if she doesn't really believe that she was witnessed and needs her audience to believe it for it to be true. Her speech becomes littered with desperate, unconvincing exclamation points:

"I won, you see? I won! I won the best thing a person can win -- to be seen!"

Her questioning tone ("you see?") emphasizes her need to have the audience's approval. Though she claims that her boyfriend's words make her "proud" and that it is "beautiful to be seen," the silence from the audience is deafening. It's hard to imagine that the speaker has truly found her peace and will now be able to "be dead for the rest of eternity." She might have had better luck if she had been braver when she had the chance.