Reviews with content warning for Sexual content - How Should a Person Be?

Reviews tagging 'Sexual content'

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

8 reviews

savvylit's review against another edition

reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No

2.5

How Should a Person Be? is oddly captivating metafiction. The concept is interesting - philosophical conversations among creatives. It's definitely a mark of adulthood to have deep conversations with your friends about the meaning of life, and to be searching for some meaning together. It was somewhat fun to feel like a voyeur experiencing Heti's conversations secondhand. However, I'm not sure that these conversations are enough to make a book worth reading.

Additionally, this is a plotless, character-focused book with very few likable characters. Sheila portrays both herself and her close friends as unabashedly vain and pretentious. Their attitude towards money and labor is particularly cavalier and seems to reflect an unwritten privilege. Perhaps this book is just too honest; real people are indeed flawed and Heti doesn't hold back in revealing her own flaws.

Overall, I thought How Should a Person Be? was well-written and nominally interesting. However, I wouldn't recommend it nor be interested in revisiting it again in the future.

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leenvanhoudt's review against another edition

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reflective medium-paced

4.0

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marissab's review against another edition

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dark funny reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.25

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baruss666's review against another edition

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informative reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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abbyeck's review against another edition

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funny reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.75

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tumbly_weed's review against another edition

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challenging emotional sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.25

For the first 3/4 of the book I found it pretentious and obnoxious. I set it down, planning to give up on it. But I hate not-finishing books, and I wanted to find out why it had done well, so I decided to finish. The final quarter of the book really brought together the purpose; seeing through the narcissism of the main character while she sees her narcissism, too, and her obsession with being understood and understanding herself.

I’m not really sure what I got out of the book, but there was something pretty stunning about the author being so vulnerable about how shitty a person she saw herself as. I hope she has grown to perceive herself less darkly. I can see why Lena Dunham liked the book, but for me, this is a category of story that has a lot of self-loathing, and I don’t need more examples of how to do that in my brain.

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dylan2219's review against another edition

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lighthearted reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

Difficult to know what to make of this book: it's very strange in both construction and content, often maddeningly unlikeable, but weirdly compelling. I don't even know if it's about anything. Sheila Heti is a very good writer, if a very matter of fact one, so the effect is somewhere between a personal blog post and a novel. This makes sense as its coming out just as the 2010s begin, social media is beginning to effect the way we think and talk to each other. There's even an element of that early 2010s quirk culture: like overusing exclamation points and focussing on the mundane to imbue it with a sense of wonder (e.g. the use of emails and play-like dialogue passages in the book reminds me of this). How Should a Person Be? is a book that's primarily concerned with its title question, and the realisation that it is unanswerable. Sheila - the narrator - is so myopically obsessed with her own desire to become loved that she just sucks things out of people - mostly her friends - and gains none of it. She is preoccupied with beauty, yet ends up swamped in ugliness: climaxing in both an ugly painting competition and the hairy asscrack of a terrible man. There is a very end-of-2000s nihilism cutting through the whole thing. Economic insecurity, highly competitive arts scenes, and exorbitant living costs all make our heroine's quest for beauty and existential success a failure from the get-go. Moreover, fourth-wave feminism rubs up uneasily against her relationship with men. Sheila is a proud "blow-job artist", her marriage ends for reasons unknowable to her and her husband, and she maintains a fling with a deeply misogynistic, perverted baker who thinks he's a sex god. Sheila, begrudingly, agrees on this point. For these reasons I've seen this book compared to Girls a lot: it is unabashed in its narcissism and narrowness, centred around ostensibly feminist women who don't seem to act very much like feminists, and is concerned with the struggles of privileged artists in major cities. The comparison is kind of apt, but where I found Girls to revel in its self-centredness and make us like these unchanging, adult babies, it's these qualities that are the undoing of Sheila in this book that block her out from finding the answers she wants, needs to function as the image of what she desires herself to be. Sheila and her friends often say terrible, stupid things but convince themselves they're profound, or prefer to live in a fantasy in which they are. It is a great portrait of the beginning of the end of millennial optimism, of the gradual realisation of the superficiality of 21st century being, the death of old forms and idols. It is a book about realising you, and all your friends, are kind of full of shit, but that's all you have going for you so you need to develop new forms and idols to give it meaning. Whether you like this or not, or find that interesting, will determine how much you get out of this book.

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kamuffel's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional funny inspiring reflective medium-paced

Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

I enjoyed this more than I expected. It's an interesting mix of styles, at times beautifully poetic, then again pure transcriptions of dialogues. As an artist I found it inspiring. (There were parts that I did not relate to as strongly as others).

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