And ultimately I found Heti’s portrayal of female friendship – something I always like to read about – disappointing. And – though I hesitate to use the word ‘blowing’- it is mind-blowing when you’re young to realize that ‘one is a reproduction of the human type: one sleeps like other humans, eats like other humans, loves like other humans, and is born and dies like other humans.’ But did I empathize with Sheila’s metaphysical plight? Nah, not a lot. And occasionally I think I recognized a laughable irony or two, such as when Margaux decides autism is ‘an advantageous trait’, or when the Jungian analyst attempts to interpret Sheila’s dream about flying: ‘Did you imagine writing the play would get you somewhere higher and better, just like an airplane does?’ĭeciding how, and what to create in a world overpopulated with creations is certainly a dilemma worthy of discussion. Meeting him again later, they wonder aloud, ‘Why we pick certain dots and connect them, and not others?.’ I did love that image of life as a dot to dot puzzle. ‘Destiny became like an opaque, demanding, poorly communicative parent, and I was its child, ever trying to please it, to figure out what it wanted of me.’ Turning her back on that destiny leads Sheila to divorce her husband. There are fleeting glimpses of the real trials of life, glinty flashes of truth. In between working shifts at a hairdressing salon (a job recommended by her Jungian analyst), she does way too much thinking and spends way too much time perfecting blow jobs for the benefit of her jerk of a boyfriend, Israel (about whose sexual proclivities we garner way too much information). New BF Margaux is an artist and Sheila is trying to write a dreadful-sounding play, although to her credit she seems hell-bent on doing anything rather than write it. Sheila (for reader, it is she) and her arty-farty friends hang out in Toronto’s art galleries and cafés – and try and decide how to live their lives, having ‘weeded out’ all the ugly people. I can just about see what’s meta about it, but it didn’t strike me as a new kind of anything. For one critic, it was even ‘a new kind of book’. Its bizarre blend of philosophy, fiction, playscript, email and autobiography wowed a whole phalanx of US critics, with Dunham dubbing it: ‘A really amazing metafiction-meets-nonfiction novel’. It arrived here from North America festooned with admiring quotes by the likes of Margaret Atwood and James Wood of The New Yorker, along with TV writer of the moment Lena Dunham, creator of HBO’s hit series Girls, to which this book has several times been compared. This self-confessed roman a clef by Canadian writer Sheila Heti hasn’t baffled everyone. How should a person read this book? I’m darned if this person is any the wiser 300 pages later. Published by Harvill Secker 24 January 2013

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti