How Should a Person Be

(Paperback)

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Description

An utterly cool and covetable new look for Sheila Heti's genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium, publishing alongside the paperback of Pure Colour in 2023 'It made me want to write' Sally Rooney 'A seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for authenticity' Margaret Atwood 'A classic in the making' Stylist Sheila's twenties were going to plan. She got married. She hosted parties. A theatre asked her to write a play. Then she realised that she didn't know how to write a play. That her favourite part of the party was cleaning up after the party. And that her marriage made her feel like she was banging into a brick wall. So Sheila abandons her marriage and her play, befriends Margaux, a free and untortured painter, and begins sleeping with the dominating Israel, who's a genius at sex but not at art. She throws herself into recording them and everyone around her, investigating how they live, desperate to know, as she wanders, How Should a Person Be Using transcripts, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, Heti crafts an exciting, courageous, and mordantly funny tour through one woman's heart and mind. LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION

Reviews

Witty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...a classic in the making * Stylist *
Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form * Marie Claire *
Amazing -- Lena Dunham
A shamelessly funny read * Grazia *
Funny, bawdy and fiercely original * Easy Living *
A sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it is like to be a 20-something now * Economist *
A book that risks everything... Complex, artfully messy, and hilarious -- Miranda July
Uniquely honest, funny and clever... Heti is superbly truthful and shockingly funny - no words were minced in the making of this strange, brilliant book -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
Joyously self-consciousprofoundly ironicor, perhaps more accurately, it is a production profoundly concerned with how to live authentically in a world saturated by irony -- Olivia Laing * New Statesman *
Utterly beguiling: blunt, charming, funny, and smart. Heti subtly weaves together ideas about sex, femininity and artistic ambition. Reading this genre-defying book was pure pleasure -- David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
Engaging * Guardian *
Genuinely laugh out loud * Daily Mail *
Utterly now -- Claire Allfree * Metro *
Ambitious, assured and ruthlessly controlledexhilarating -- Richard Beck * Prospect *
How Should a Person Be is a question to be revisited by the author herself, or another writer, or many other writers but its also the question novels were invented to respond to Sheila makes it ugly to clear a space: for novels to be less fictional, for women to dream of being geniuses, for a way of being 'honest and transparent and give away nothing' -- Joanna Briggs * London Review of Books *
A timely, gloriously messy, openhearted, clever and beautiful new thing * Dazed & Confused *
An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide * Grazia *
A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring expositionfascinating -- Sinead Gleeson * Irish Times *
Provocative, funny and original -- Hannah Rosefield * Literary Review *
A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept ones own ugliness -- Richard Godwin * Evening Standard *
An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds -- Lidija Haas * Times Literary Supplement *
A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture -- Natasha Lehrer * Jewish Chronicle *
[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cantHow Should a Person Be offers a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western CityThis talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being * James Wood, New Yorker *
Funnyodd, original, and nearly unclassifiableSheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of * New York Times *
Playful, funny... absolutely true * The Paris Review *
Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations -- Eve Commander * Big Issue in the North *
Amusing and original * Mail on Sunday *

Author Bio

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood and How Should a Person Be, which New York magazine deemed one of the 'New Classics' of the twenty-first century and which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. Her novels have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto and Kawartha Lakes, Ontario.