Photo credit: Leah Fae
Heidi Reimer is a novelist and writing coach. Her debut novel, The Mother Act, received a starred review in Publishers Weekly, praise in the New York Times Book Review, and attention from CBC Radio’s The Next Chapter, Chatelaine, and People. Her second novel, What We Found Instead, arrives July 28, 2026—a story of two women who meet as romantic rivals and end up choosing each other. Early readers have called it “the rom-com I didn’t know I needed” and “an inspiring take on the true meaning of partnership,” praising its “vulnerable strength” and “fierce fragility.” Heidi has published in LitHub, Chatelaine, The New Quarterly, Literary Mama, and the anthologies The M Word: Conversations About Motherhood and Body & Soul: Stories for Skeptics and Seekers.
THE LONG VERSION: Heidi Reimer’s mission is to create immersive stories that make people feel expanded, deeply engaged, and more meaningfully connected. (It tends to be women, but she’s been surprised at how many men resonate with her work, too.)
The complexity of women's inner lives, the psychological legacies of childhood, the hunger to break free of what we're given…these are the obsessions of her life and, inevitably, her work. Her novels follow women in the act of becoming: shedding inherited beliefs, discovering what they actually want, and sometimes finding their most essential relationships in the last place they expected to look.
Heidi Reimer’s debut novel, The Mother Act, is a mother-daughter story that unfolds on the opening night of a one-woman show. The performer is a controversial feminist figure and outspoken critic of societal expectations of motherhood. Her estranged 24-year-old daughter is in the audience, watching her mother account for the choices that shaped her life. The biggest of these? Prioritizing her own ambition, personal needs, and creative fulfillment when she abandoned her as a toddler.
Her second novel, What We Found Instead, forthcoming July 2026, explores the unlikely bond two women forge in the wreckage of one man's betrayal. The story opens as Maggie discovers her boyfriend has a girlfriend she didn't know about. She tracks down the other woman, and as Maggie and Eve search for answers, mistrust slowly gives way to honesty, vulnerability, and an unexpected affinity. The novel is less about betrayal than about what happens when women choose connection over competition, even when doing so feels risky. It's a love story of sorts—platonic, and between the two women.
What We Found Instead had its beginning more than two decades ago, when Heidi first had the idea to throw two women together in a circumstance that ought to divide them—and see what would happen if it didn't. The seed of that question was already growing in her own life. Her closest friendship began when she and her now-best-friend, Anena, were both drawn to the same man. He chose her friend. What neither of them could have anticipated was that this was actually the beginning of something far more significant than any short-lived romance: a decades-long friendship in which they have supported each other to become themselves, worked through their wounds together, and figured out in tandem the kinds of women they wanted to be. The novel explores that kind of bond, the one that outlasts and outgrows almost everything else.
Heidi’s desire to be a novelist began in childhood, when she first realized at the age of eight that immersion in a novel was the very best thing in the world. She wrote stories freely until it came time to turn the lifelong dream into a grown-up reality…and the greatest pleasure of her life became hard. She spent her twenties writing and abandoning short stories and essays and novels and partial novels, travelled a bunch, supported herself as a waitress and office admin and bookseller and personal assistant, regularly defeated by her own self-doubt, perfectionism, and the fear that she didn’t have what it took.
In her thirties, she got an English degree, got married, got pregnant (and adopted a toddler on the same day, kind of). She grappled with marriage and motherhood inside the pages of the story that would become The Mother Act. She figured out how to partner sustainbly with the creative process and how to write a viable novel.
Along the way, she also deconstructed the wounds of a pretty hardcore patriarchal religious upbringing, shed beliefs that had confined and defined her, and found her way more deeply into herself. Which is a pretty big reason her characters are often on that kind of journey too, breaking free of expectation, untangling layers of indocrination and survival patterns, figuring out who they are.
Bringing The Mother Act to completion and then publication was a process riddled with obstacles, joy, purpose and tears. For a period of two years she abandoned the book due to what she thought was the unviability of the structure (taking place all on one night, but spanning decades—hard!). During a dark month of the soul in 2020 (but who didn’t have one of those in 2020?), she looked head-on at the question of whether she could be delusional and/or was one of those writers for whom it was just not going to happen. She had an excellent therapist helping her through this crisis, and for a while she seriously considered quitting writing and training to become a therapist. She came through it more certain than ever of the worth of her work, sourcing her value from within herself in a new and deeper way.
It was, in fact, fifteen minutes after weeping in a therapy session about her inability to get a novel published that she found out an editor at Random House Canada was interested in The Mother Act. From that moment, decades of quietly, invisibly trying and failing and yearning and learning to write began to grow into something bigger.
The Mother Act launched in April 2024. What We Found Instead is following close on its heels, arriving into the world July 28, 2026.
As the creator of Novel Alchemy and Novel Refinery, her group coaching programs at Sarah Selecky Writing School, Heidi also helps other writers identify and work through the self-doubt, fear, and creative blocks she knows so intimately from her own story. This is one of her greatest joys and a beautiful, heartfelt full circle.
Join me on the adventure!
My letters land every 2 weeks on the full and new moon…because why not harness a little cyclical celestial alignment? I write about books, creative practice, and being a human on a path of self-becoming.