How Should a Person Be?
A Novel from Life
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3.3 • 80 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Chosen as one of fifteen remarkable books by women that are shaping the way we read and write in the 21st century by the book critics of The New York Times.
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.
"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
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?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With a quirky mixture of e-mails, transcribed conversations, and prose, frequent Believer contributor Heti (2004's The Middle Stories) examines her titular question by emphasizing that, like life itself, the story of protagonist Sheila; her degenerate artist boyfriend, Israel; and her best friend, Margaux, doesn't always make perfect sense. After she leaves her husband, Sheila an aspiring Toronto playwright by night and hair salon employee by day looks to her friends and the world at large to determine how to be. Acts divided into chapters interspersed with conversations transcribed to read like plays follow Sheila from home to New York to Atlantic City in her search for clarity. Autobiographical elements abound: like Heti's metafictional protagonist, the author studied playwriting and lives in Toronto. Heti has an artist friend named Margaux with whom she has collaborated and to whom she dedicates this novel. Original, contemplative, and often tangential, this is an unorthodox compilation of colorful characters, friendship, and sex that provides an unusual answer to Heti's question.
Customer Reviews
How should a person be?
The author's description of studying others to find her identity resonated with me. However, I was disappointed with the explicit sexual descriptions and stream of thought paragraphs. I found them uninteresting and cliche. Overall, it had potential, but never reached the fullness of character I was expecting.
Bravo
Confused on these reviews. It was spell binding and magical
Memoir of a Self Absorbed Vapid Hipster
A bored book written about a self-proclaimed "artist" who is so shipwrecked that they've lost sight of dignity, personal accountability, or excellence. A boring monologue about absolutely nothing special but self-absorbed existential angst.