How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

Named a Book of the Year by The New York Times Book Review,The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Flavorpill, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post

A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium — a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum).

By turns loved and reviled upon its U.S. publication, Sheila Hetis “breakthrough novel” (Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Review of Books) is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman's heart and mind. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part vivid exploration of the artistic and sexual impulse, How Should a Person Be? earned Heti comparisons to Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Flaubert, while shocking and exciting readers with its raw, urgent depiction of female friendship and of the shape of our lives now. Irreverent, brilliant, and completely original, Heti challenges, questions, frustrates, and entertains in equal measure. With urgency and candor she asks: What is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?

“Funny...odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable...unlike any novel I can think of.” David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review

“Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy.” San Francisco Chronicle

“One of the bravest, strangest, most original novels I've read this year.” The Boston Globe

“A vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western city.” The New Yorker

"It is easy to see why a book on the anxiety of celebrity has turned the author into one herself." The Economist

“A book that risks everything....Complex, artfully messy, and hilarious.” Miranda July

“A really amazing metafiction-meets-nonfiction novel.” Lena Dunham

“Boldly original....Gorgeously rendered.” NPR

"Original...hilarious....Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more — its one wild ride....Think HBO's Girls in book form." Marie Claire

“How Should a Person Be? teeters between youthful pretension and irony in ways that are as old as Flauberts Sentimental Education...but Ms. Heti manages to give Sheilas struggle a contemporary and particular feel....How Should a Person Be? reveals a talented young voice of a still inchoate generation.” The Wall Street Journal

“Heti knows what she's doing — much of the pleasure of How Should a Person Be? comes from watching her control the norms she's subverting.” Slate

"[A] breakthrough novel....Just as Mary McCarthy's The Company She Keeps (written at the same age) was an explosive and thrilling rejoinder to the serious, male coming-of-age saga exemplified during her era by Sartre's The Age of Reason, Heti's book exuberantly appropriates the same, otherwise tired genre to encompass female experience. How Should a Person Be?s deft, picaresque construction, which lightly-but-devastatingly parodies the mores of Toronto's art scene, has more in common with Don Quixote than with Lena Dunham's HBO series “Girls” or the fatuous blogs and social media it will, due to its use of constructed reality, inevitably be compared with....Like [Kathy] Acker, [Heti] is a brilliant, original thinker and an engaging writer." LA Review of Books

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction, including The Middle Stories and Ticknor; and an essay collection written with Misha Glouberman, The Chairs Are Where the People Go. Her writing has been translated into ten languages and her work has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, McSweeney's, n+1, The Guardian, and other places. She works as interviews editor at The Believer magazine and lives in Toronto.