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A review by savaging
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
2.0
At certain times in my life, I have been obsessed with the question of how a person should be. Now I'm a little shoulder-shrugging, thinking well we're primates so really what could we expect? Primates are always getting into trouble.
But back when I did more hand-wringing, I came up with a lot of possibilities of how a person should be. None of them were as boring as the options Heti considers.
This is a book about wanting to be a great artist but finding it's hard to be a great artist, and so instead mostly writing emails and doing coke. I liked how important the central friendship is to both characters, but the details of it were dull (the big climatic crisis is that Sheila buys the same yellow dress as Margaux). Haven't we all read enough autobiographical novels by now to know that artists' lives are, in general, the most boring ones out there?
But back when I did more hand-wringing, I came up with a lot of possibilities of how a person should be. None of them were as boring as the options Heti considers.
This is a book about wanting to be a great artist but finding it's hard to be a great artist, and so instead mostly writing emails and doing coke. I liked how important the central friendship is to both characters, but the details of it were dull (the big climatic crisis is that Sheila buys the same yellow dress as Margaux). Haven't we all read enough autobiographical novels by now to know that artists' lives are, in general, the most boring ones out there?