Download And Enjoy How Should A Person Be? Envisioned By Sheila Heti Supplied As Print

started responding to my GR friend Gaeta's comment, but then I thought I'd take a cue from Ms, Heti, and make my transcribed dialogue with my friends into the text itself, How fascinating, not.

So:

GAETA
I was frightened off by the "sexy and depraved" tag, It seemed I'mtoocoolforyou and exhaustingly quirky,

ELAINE
Yes, "sexy and depraved, . . " More likeShades of Gray by way of Williamsburg or whatever the equivalent Canadian hipster ghetto is, AfterShades, is it really transgressive to revel in your own subjugation Don't people readShades at the Olive Garden I think degradation has jumped the shark.


This book is exactly like spending several hours with a narcissistic vain hipsterette who won't shut up, Like The Fault in Our Stars, it's vaguely possible that there is an appropriate age for this book, and I am not it.
But unlike TFiOS, which is about, and I think for, adolescents, this book is disturbingly about midsomethings making you wish the author and her seminonfictional characters/friends would just grow up!

This book has been much compared to Girls.
And it does read like the script of Girls' worst episodes NB I like Girls, but find it uneven or like your college journal if you were a particularly bitchy selfcentered unthoughtful college student taken with your own ability to name drop fancy artists and philosophers ok, we were all probably a little like that.
But Lena Dunham is, and her character is, and funnier and more selfaware in a real way as opposed to a precious way than Heti is.
And we were allwhen we wrote that college journal, Sheila Heti and her characters are circa, That's too old to spend your days drunk and wasted, thinking exceedingly dull and trite "deep thoughts" about art and working and life, and hoping that you will somehow become great at art by thinking about it enough, as opposed to actually engaging with the universe on some nonnavelgazing level.


It is possible that this book is a great satiric summary of the utter loss and lostness of a certain generation of entitled aging bright exyoung things and wouldbeartists.
But I think it's not a satire more like an artifact, How sad.

To me, this book is the trucker hat of novels, It's ugly and terribly banal, yet is supposed to be so ugly and terribly banal that it's actually ironically cool, In the end, it's only dull and irritating, but, like the trucker hat, liking it signifies your participation in a certain ingroup, As with the trucker hat, if you have to ask if its real or ersatz, ironic or earnest, you are probably too old or too square to get the point and you probably don't know that "Margaux" and "Sholom" are real people who are actual artists in Toronto and actually friends with Heti w/ luck you don't care.


Every week when I watch Girls, even or especially the better episodes, I thank heaven I'm notanymore, This book had a similar salutary effect on me, Here we go then.

The strange case of why some people usually only females dont seem to get this book,

Is it because they dislike the author Or are they jealous of the authors talent I cant tell,

After the first chapter I wanted to be her friend, Maybe I could empathise with some of her comments And she made me laugh out loud, Especially the parts about her sex life, And her friendship with Margaux,

So I dont know why other women dislike her, Except that plenty of females dont like me either, Too pretty, too clever, too arrogant, Something like that.

M recommended this to me, Im pleased that she did, Sheila is among those writers that are not content to write conventional novels, Is this even a novel Im not sure, Does it fucking matter Not to me, Probably to those boring cunts who dont like Sheila,

I wanted to read this primarily because Sheila is one of the writers that David Shields influential book “Reality Hunger” refers to as representing a departure from traditional narrative, plot, or indeed story.
Which is all very refreshing if, like me, you happen to like experimental art, If you dont, stop fucking complaining and get back to your “Da Vinci Code”,

How should a person be This book doesnt answer that question, nor should it, But it did make me laugh, and cry, And it also contains some good advice about blow jobs,

Yeah, okay, I fell for it, Read it in a great swooping gulp, Perfect book for me to read in the anguishing throes of a girlfight which is taking up every inch of mental real estate.
Chloe amp Olivia, ampc. Want to reread it immediately, want to post swathes of excerpt for everyone and myself and the world and preach the Gospel of Heti's style.
The fauxnaif flatly mannered simplicity, Hemingway by way of Lydia Davis, only even more stripped down and artlesspeople have said Patti Smith and they're not wrong maybe I think only I'm personally convinced that Patti had one hell of an overworked, inexhaustible editor, and probably handed that woman a thousand pages of crap which she tore apart and reworked and put back together in order.
Like y'all I liked the chapter on fucking too, which is scary and gross and pretty much perfect in its abject obsessiveness, But, I guess in the end I could see the seams of the book too clearly, and its ambition diminished, I could see exactly how the chapters were written separately and at different times and stitched together like a quilt, and this is how some books are, it does open out the form and give it a possibility to be mine, because it's that kind of narrative where I keep thinking: maybe I too can pursue a long prose form, maybe I can hang my tattery rage lttypo for rags! of beautiful postflarf onto these kinds of storybones.


Here's the thing: I'm simultaneously reading House of Leaves, which is just stunning, and with every page I think yes, yes, I want to do THIS, I want to write that sitelinkBig Baggy Book of Me, that maximalist wonder that can contain everything, all of itguitar, magic, science, Jesus, fundamentalism, Texas, piano, Chopin, Bach, astronomy, Plato, Aristotle, having your faith ruined by attic Greek playwrights, sex, mise en abîme, the abysmal, the degraded, women's colleges, radical feminism, lovers, betrayal, two psych units, drugs and drugs, Cambridge as academic fairyland, the semiautomated mechanics of heterosexual marriage, Paris, Florence, Venice, Boston, workshop, losing your soul, Santa Fe, Zen, sexual harassment, bewilderment, broken bones, throwing up in a motel room in Arkansas, shaving your own head, adultery,and everything afterward, including two more psych units and a lesbian psychiatrist in a black leather jacket and no hope.
And that's just the personal stuff, you want it to stretch and expand like an accordion to fit in the craziness of our culture, two Gulf Wars, the decline of the academy, the distortion and/or fruition of what Americanness meant, was meant to mean, as even the most brilliant intellectual neocons became stupid and stubbornly reactionary despite the social equality movements taking place right in front of all

our faces, the resistance to a seemingly inevitable Hegelian process making the US into the EU, no the UAE, no the EU, no the UAE, because dammit we refuse to evolve, we will remain a theocracy and all the while the oceans are heating up that last two degrees centigrade which has already doomed us.
A darkly female Bildungsroman with its healthy latte foam of latecapitalist diagnosis,

Never finding it, by the way, Never finding it again.

And when I think about all this somehow Danielewski's more capacious form form also of many female novelists as many of you and I have discussed many times seems righter to/for me than the deliberately simplified one Heti crafts and occupies so perfectly, which fits her like a shoe.
My preference for the overwritten or overwrought or just over does not mean that I produce pages, though, so what the fuck do I know.
Also, it is very funny at times, Also, I winced a lot, Also, I want my friend to read this book, and my best friend, And I think fondly, foolishly "maybe I can write a novel about our friendship someday" since my best friend also is a painter/visual artist and since I too cannot ever finish this oneact play I started in a hospital bedand/years ago.
Because the friends get back together at the end of the book I like to think friends can always get back together, I can't finish this review without subtweeting disgustingly because I pretty much have a onetrack mind at the moment, but this is close enough.
I liked it and am glad I have the hardback, I will read it probably every year for a long time,

Also, this is pretty much what being in your twenties is like: doing a lot of geographicals, Thinking you can figure stuff out by buying an expensive bus ticket and then getting to the beach and realizing: no, you still have to deal with it on its own terms, you can't go to Atlantic City and have an epiphany, not really.


Also, I had that first boyfriend toothe one who basically sat down and wrote out what a cheap, shabby failure I would inevitably become, artistically and romantically and for all my life.
It casts a long shadow over your adult life, that sneering prognostication, That curse, so well articulated that you can never quite slip out from under it, Even when you turn to face it squarely and deliberately choose to reclaim its ugly labelling, Probably the title of the novelmy novel, I meanshould just be, Stupid Bitch, I read the British version, publishedamp shorter than the original,
Even a couple of weeks after finishing this I still cant rate it, my responses were so opposed,
At times this was the most annoying book Ive read this year, yet by the end Id warmed to the author so much I would have quite liked to talk to her.

If this sort of thing is a significant trend in the current avant garde, I despair of its insulated triviality, Yet I can also sort of see where shes coming from and I found it quite interesting,

How Should a Person Be was first published inby a small press in Canada its Hetis third book but her first to gain much attention.
Which attention in America it helped that shes also the interviews editor of The Believer, McSweeneys “lets only write about books we can be nice about” mag led to its being published there inand now this year in the UK.
It blurs memoir amp fiction in a way that AltLit is very fond of characters share the names of the author and her friends and are closely based on them and it uses a similar style, though one which is more fauxnaïve than flat and banal.


Its advertised themes include personal identity and feminism, though I side with those who think its more about narcissism and overcocooned creative cultures.


It seemed important to realise that Heti wasnt writing it all about herself now that most of it happened in her twenties.
Many of her central questions, like the one in the title, have been described by others as teenage probably a lot of people did deal with them then.
I recognised a lot of it from my twenties, being honest with myself, once I took a deep breath and stopped being exasperated assuming that she should also have got a reasonable amount of this out of the way by her midthirties, also realising what that thought said about me.
Its just like with Altlit, that watching someone ponder their own narcissism makes this reader do the same, and whilst the writers generally intend that, I dont much like that suffocating little mirrored narcissibubble and find it airier and a better view when thinking about other things.
So forgive me if I dont spell out every point of selfawareness and recursion which occurred whilst reading this book, There were plenty.

“How should a person be” has the potential to be a weighty moral question, But its not really treated as such here, It isnt essentially about ethics, its about image and selfpresentation and how to be someone who effortlessly produces satisfactory versions of those, how to fit in with or carve out your own niche among “people like you”, or people whom you aspire to be like or rather your idea of them as generated by media, arts and how you view your friends.
Its a thoughtbubble fragileself world where this particular idea of “should” rules, rather than instincts of what you want to do and what you feel, and what you may think is morally right.
And because Sheila I will use Sheila to refer to the character, and Heti for the author only associates with other young ablebodied middleclass creative white people in a milieu deliberately made to resemble reality TV the LRB review cites The Hills as one of Heti's influences there isnt much push towards these other ideas, though they do appear at times.


Heti has described the book as part memoir, part fiction, but also part selfhelp book, Its described as an antinovel but Sheilas various realisations about herself which make up the implied selfhelp part as well as events in her close friendship with Margaux do create a plot structure.
Her therapist's has to take unskilled job to get by / keeps Jungian analyst on speed dial, . . I can't quite figure out her budget, but anyway advice about Peter Pan syndrome and and the way out of it being to achieve and get things done is very American and capitalistic.
Letting go of the ideas about being "great" and "superior" don't seem to be anywhere, which I thought was a shame both politically and socially.
The later narrative, I was happy and patronising to see, did include ideas about becoming more aware of how she felt and acting on the basis of them rather than being so ruled by her ideas of how she might appear most interesting to others, or “how to be” in order to be a Great Writer etc.
It was a very nice way of illustrating natural "selfhelp" through reflection and the process of living rather than parroting jargon and rules.


That is good, but what was almost missing was a moral sense, or even much thought about, things outside her own firstworldproblems bubble, which was typified by the very detached use of the category “poor people”.
Sheila does start seeing them as individuals, just as two male friends of hers who run a theatre go to Africa on holiday which they basically describe as a holiday from narcissism and experience revelations about the humanity and needs of others different from themselves.
But the friends ideas about this recede because they cant understand how to integrate them into their own lives without walking out on everything.
Er, hello, ever heard of community theatre work

As far as the feminism is concerned Sheila is a thoroughly liberated free modern woman with very few obligations who, in an ideological sense, still seems to think she has to fight certain old battles.
Most of the action takes place during a time when shes trying to complete a play for a feminist theatre group which shes been working on for ages, around the time of her divorce.
At the start she is somewhat preoccupied with ideas about how to be a Great Woman, that there arent too many examples to draw on for inspiration yet really This lackofgreatwomeninliterature angst does seem to be an American thing: we've plenty in Britain now and in the pastyrs.
Anyway, Im of the view that it doesnt matter who she takes inspiration from, shes a woman herself, and its more egalitarian to reject these separatist ideas and genderbased designations.
Yet she doesnt write about feminist ideology and history even when it would have been interesting and appropriate e, g. when she takes a job in a hairdressers to support herself whilst writing the play, Evidently shes not a dungarees and no make up type, but more ideas would have been nice: I was reading this to hear about what she thinks, not just to rattle around in my own head considering my own opinions.
She spends a lot of time with her friend Margaux whom she tries to imitate to an extent, having not really had any close female friends before her.
It would have been more interesting if shed gone into whybut its part of the simplicity of the writing style that she ignores that sort of background material.
Sheila basically seems to be a sex positive feminist most of the best writing in this book is in the chapter “Interlude for Fucking” which even if youre not into all the kinks she is e.
g. I really dont like the mean talk / verbal abuse stuff gives a fantastic sense of what it is to crave someone completely, written in a really fresh way.
And one of the most interesting parts of her increasing selfdefinition, especially in the light of books that have been published betweenand the present, is how she starts to make more conscious and critical decisions about sexual submission.
Though noone can blame Heti for not foregrounding Shades of Grey etc, this book has inadvertently become part of the current media overrepresentation of female kink as only being about rather unsubversive young attractive straight submissives as criticised eloquently by sitelinkLaurie Penny in this blog post.


The deliberately simplistic style of writing in the book is something I can see two ways, Its an honest and immediate representation of thoughts and feelings which I appreciate in a personcentred, Carl Rogersinfluenced sort of way, But its also frustrating on a personal level I just want to know more of what she thinks about certain situations and on an intellectual level.
Works like this and Marie Calloways sitelinkwhat purpose did i serve in your life are an implied subversion of “male” intellectualising but I think that does a real disservice to interesting and useful forms of thought and expression that really need not be equated with any gender and perhaps they even selfsabotagingly increase that sense of genderedness.
Regardless of gender debates, they are also arguably a disservice to the writer whose ideas receive less recognition because they are never expressly spelt out in the work.
Even, say, in one or two chapters that make them clear, On some level, I have to admit that similar to sitelinkLydia Kiesling in her brilliant review of Tao Lin's Taipei in Ihe Millions, I just aesthetically dont like this approach that much.


And the same goes for the prolonged explorations of narcissism in these works and AltLit generally, Theres only so much “yeah, Ive thought that too” one can do before it gets old and of course not everybody has thought that.
“Feminist narcissism” a minor buzzphrase around mostly American writers like this is all very well in terms of having enough ego to put your work out there, but even to other somewhat narcissistic middleclass women like me narcissism as the main substance of the art itself is just a bit boring after a while.
There are so many other interesting things in the world, and even in one egotistical persons head and life, to think and care about than that particular set of ideas.
David Foster Wallaces Good Old Neon was a story about narcissism but it took a wider context, albeit a negative one, So perhaps what Heti is saying in contrast to DFW's conclusion is that narcissism in a nonaggressive form especially, isn't exactly the worst thing in the world and isn't necessarily worth quite so much shame.
The shame that's the flipside to the egotism, and the shamefulness with which the narcissist may be regarded by others shame which Heti tries to exorcise for herself by writing a "deliberately ugly" book including potentially embarrassing material.
For her it looks like this therapeutic risktaking turned out brilliantly, as she's been acclaimed for it, She's saying it's not hopeless, you can improve bits and pieces and it's still okay to be yourself, "Benignly narcissistic white middle class artists are people too," perhaps, Even if billions don't care either way,

Ive spentwords mostly criticising this book, yet, even if Sheilas social circle was a bit stifling, I quite liked her in the end and when I think back on the later part of the book in a nonspecific sense, I feel it was an interesting experience and one I liked.
How strange. .