A review by dylan2219
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

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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