Name: Sila Baykal's review of How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Item: How Should a Person Be?
Rating: 3
Author: Sila Baykal

Sheila Heti

Facing a creative dilemma after a failed marriage, Sheila gathers inspiration from a depraved and free-spirited artist who becomes her lover, in a tale based on incidents from the author's true life that combines literary observations, self-help advice and unstinting confessions. By the author of Ticknor.

A Novel from Life

How Should a Person Be?

Neta Steingart

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Middle Storiesand Ticknorcomes a bold interrogation into the possibility of a beautiful life. How Should a Person Be?is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the artist as a young woman — of two such artists, in fact. For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux, a painter, and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which the blow job is the ultimate art form. She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself. Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be?is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada's most fiercely original writer.

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.

Sila Baykal

"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."

Jim Hagan

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.

Gavin

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.

Jacob Mishook

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.

Katie Chua

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

Donald

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.

Leafling

Jen Taylor

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.

khaoula

death nurse

"Funny...odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable...unlike any novel I can think of."--David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review "Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy."--San Francisco Chronicle Named a Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review,The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Flavorpill, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium--a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum) By turns loved and reviled upon its U.S. publication, Sheila Heti's "breakthrough novel" (Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Review of Books) is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman's heart and mind. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part vivid exploration of the artistic and sexual impulse, How Should a Person Be? earned Heti comparisons to Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Flaubert, while shocking and exciting readers with its raw, urgent depiction of female friendship and of the shape of our lives now. Irreverent, brilliant, and completely original, Heti challenges, questions, frustrates, and entertains in equal measure. With urgency and candor she asks: What is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?

Neta Steingart &
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

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Neta Steingart &How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

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Neta Steingart &
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti