The month, the Varsity Book Club is discussing Sheila Heti’s How Should A Person Be? Heti is the Toronto author of two books: a collection of short stories released in 2001, and her debut novel, Ticknor, which was published in 2005. She is also the co-creator of the popular lecture series Trampoline Hall. How Should A Person Be? was published by House of Anansi Press in September. The books follows the story of a young writer living in Toronto, also named Sheila, who is struggling with writer’s block and questioning her identity as an artist.
Jade Colbert: So we’ve got this character, Sheila, who seems to be going through some sort of identity crisis; the book’s question — “How should a person be?” — is one that she’s working out through the book. The novel is divided into a Prologue, Five Acts, and then what I guess is an Epilogue. One assumes that this structure is to mirror the play that Sheila is working on.
Emily Kellogg: It was kind of hinged on a discussion of art, in which living your life kind of becomes an art form: an exploration of what life as art actually is. It’s very much a discussion about what life should be. Should it be beautiful? Should it be meaningful? Should it be fulfilling? It’s supposed to be a novel, but it is one of those books that is less what happens in this book… it’s almost a philosophical treatise.
Brigit Katz: Kind of an orally fixated Plato’s Republic.
JC: Let’s get into that a bit more. Who is this book? Who is Sheila? Heti has insisted in interviews that this is a work of fiction, and that the characters, while sharing the names of various people within the Toronto arts community, are the fictional counterparts of those same people. I found Sheila to be one of the most brutally honest characters I’ve ever read.
EK: Heti said in an interview that the character Sheila is the worst parts of herself concentrated into one character. And I didn’t like her. In fact, I kind of hate her. The problems that she’s dealing with are so quintessentially first-world, and I think I’m frustrated with her insofar as she is one of the most self-indulgent characters I’ve ever read.
JC: I don’t think it’s fair to criticize a character for being a bad person, because there are plenty of people I enjoy spending time with who aren’t good people. What grated me, was her voice. All the bad things about Sheila come out because she is the one telling her this story. But this person is not trying to be liked.
BK: The book almost turns into a textbook of self-indulgent anxiety. The novel is really fixated on art, she does with the plot what people do with art. She picks it apart until it loses its specialness and its beauty, pulled apart to the point where you can’t stand the author anymore. And ultimately, the book takes a really holier-than-though attitude: a person should live ‘just like my five artist friends.’
JC: In the book Sheila meets Margaux, who is the fictional counterpart to Margaux Williamson, the Toronto painter; they meet, and it’s a meeting of minds as well. They’re both creative individuals and take to one another pretty immediately. Neither of them has ever had a female friend, so this is new territory for the both of them. Their relationship becomes strained fairly early on, though, because Sheila has writer’s block on the play she’s supposed to have finished. Sheila admires how Margaux seems comfortable in her knowledge of herself and how Margaux is not experiencing a block at all. What did you make of their relationship?
BK: Sheila’s relationship with Margaux — as annoying as I found the two of them — opens the gates to have her become an individual. And that’s the contrast between the male and female characters. She tries to transfer that consuming quality of her relationship with her boyfriend, Israel, and be controlled by Margaux, instead. But Margaux doesn’t let her do that. She makes her become a person.
EK: Margaux is really only what Sheila conceives her to be. She’s two-dimensional in that Sheila has limited her in her own mind, and that is the only thing we see of her as a character.
JC: Let’s backtrack a bit. I’m interested in hearing your initial reaction upon reading the book. It isn’t a very challenging read, and I really liked both the beginning and the end, but it’s tough slugging getting through the middle, or at least I found it that way. I just didn’t find anything pulling me through the story. Am I wrong?
EK: I do think that it’s interesting, because she writes in a minimalist style that isn’t pretty. I think that it might be a necessity, because she needs to underwrite these issues, otherwise it would seem ridiculous. You’re having a crisis, because you don’t know what your soul should consist of. Really? If that were written with more flamboyant prose, you really couldn’t take it seriously.
Joe Howell: I think a better name for this book would have been: What Should a Person Give a Fuck About.
EK: The answer would seem to be nothing.
The full conversation is available in our inaugural Adventures in Bookland podcast.
