How Should a Person Be?

Sometimes, our surroundings shape us so profoundly that we begin to drift away from our true selves, acting or even becoming someone entirely different. Over time, our mind and soul start believing in this transformation, and we strive to embody the person society imposes upon us.

"I asked him what he thought there was in us that forced us to tell stories to ourselves about our own lives - to make up stories that had such an arbitrary resemblance to our actual living. Why did we pick certain dots and connect them and not others? Why did we find it so irresistible to make ourselves into tragic figures with tragic flaws which were responsible for our pain? Maybe unfortunate things just happened; maybe there was just bad luck."

Some interesting insights here, but I came away wondering if too much of it was extraneous and confused. Then again, the book kind of explicitly highlights the sometimes intractable nature of artistic revelation. It's not a huge commitment and imo an easy (in a good way) read. Enjoyed, but not rushing to recommend.

Ooft. Uncomfortable navel-gazing about navel-gazing. Autobiographical metafictional first-world problems: unrequited narcissism and joint solipsism. Also writer’s block. It’s hard to talk about pretentious things that know they are and discuss it well: this is masterful about sophomorism and novel about the navel. It directs interpretation – ‘I can’t call it wanky, it just called itself wanky!’. Heti’s deadly serious about frivolous things, but also important ones (e.g. the passage detailing her sexual masochism, or ‘The White Men Go to Africa’, mocking poverty tourists.) The artistic equivalent of a hundred selfies. The answer to the title is “Like my friend Margaux but not too much so”: twee and wilful and sceptical and direct.

As one critic put it, it's hard to believe the author is 35 and not 25 years old. I kept being told these characters were brilliant and interesting, but nothing they said or did was anything but banal.

bad. i was intrigued by the title and also of sheila heti's name appearing in many different publications due to her recent novel, but this was like soooo bad. it was hard to get through. i did not care whatsoever. and i think one can learn how a person should be from many other books that are better written and all-around more interesting, or philosophy, or just living outside your solipsism

This book is exhilaratingly frank. It's the sort of book that puts on the page thoughts that are never spoken aloud. And it's gripping - I read it in an airport terminal and on a delayed airplane, finishing it just as the flight ended. I haven't read a book so aggressively in a long time. Like the Bolaño book I finished today, Sheila Heti's novel features lots of intoxicated artists, the sort of people I avoid in my actual life. But I like reading about them, listening in to their thoughts and conversations, cringing as they try their best to ruin their own lives. The people described in the book (which is largely autobiographical) are all smart. Some of them are very, very smart. But most of them try their best to avoid the responsibilities that come with that gift by drinking and drugging and bullshitting their lives away. And having pornographic sex. One of the striking sequences in the book is Sheila and Margaux's cocaine period. After nights of drinking and drugging, Margaux would come home and paint for hours. Sheila would come home and clean the walls, avoiding work on her play. At some point Margaux says, "I always had a fantasy of meeting a girl … who was as serious as I was." (The painter Margaux in the book is the real painter Margaux Williamson.) Well, having written this book, Sheila Heti proves she is very serious.

Beautiful and true.

I struggled with this book until the very end when Heti pulled me in and won me over with her beautiful depiction of female friendship. An accurate exploration of the misguided practice of building ourselves by emulating the people we admire around us, embracing societal expectations, and submitting to self doubt.