How Should A Person Be?

"Sheila was very influenced by Chris Kraus as well. Much like I Love Dick , this is a book that consciously blends fact and fiction. Just as the protagonist of I Love Dick is called Chris Kraus, the protagonist here is called Sheila Heti. It’s her second novel, she uses real-life friends and their works and her own work. A lot of the book centres around her trying to write a play that she promised to do years ago, and just can’t finish. She’s solving this dilemma through displacing the creative impulse. The way this book happened is quite interesting. She had some other projects she was doing which came from just having certain friends, who are in the book—Margaux Williamson, Misha Glouberman—who were people she wanted to somehow document. Fictionalising them didn’t really feel quite right, so she tried different ways of incorporating them into a project. Partly she thought, “Why do I need to put them into a work of art at all? Why isn’t it enough to just know them?” But she wanted to create something that included them, and so she created How Should a Person Be? initially out of just recording their conversations. I like the way it thinks about the uses of art as well. There’s a brilliant plot line that revolves around an Ugly Painting competition they all decide to have, which resolves at the end. It helps Sheila and some of the others think through some issues they’re having: “What are we doing? Why are we doing it?” It borrows techniques from some surprising places. In one interview, Sheila talks about being really interested in the structure of reality shows, like The Hills . I also like the amount of boredom it brings in, and some people think those sections of the book are boring, I don’t. Well, you can’t, and I’m not sure you’d even want to. Going back to B. S. Johnson, he was obsessed with Joyce and particularly Ulysses . Obviously, Ulysses is the attempt to capture the reality of a single day in someone’s life, bordering on a thousand pages, and doesn’t come close to capturing that reality. There’s a note, I think in one of Johnson’s diaries, where he writes, “It’s a whole day and Bloom only goes to the toilet once, how is that realism?” But even I wouldn’t want to read a novel where a bloke just repeatedly goes to the toilet, because it would be really boring, no matter how well you wrote it, it would be dull. You do have to edit reality. Another thing I got obsessed with as I got more into keeping journals over the last few years is the way that writing about life changes your life. When I did the Guardian series it was something I tried not to bring in, but it was my break into mainstream writing. For the first year or so I was still doing the same NHS admin job, hanging around with the same group of friends, but I gradually started to get drawn more and more into writing circles. There’s that line in the book, which people keep picking out, which is, “If you articulate an outsider critique well enough you stop being one.” I got long-listed for the Orwell prize, and started being invited to all these things in London—which was exciting. So then I moved to London and had some temporary jobs—and signed on between them—but gradually my life was changing. If you write about your life well enough, it’s difficult not to become “a writer.” Once I became aware of that, the way I solved it in the Guardian series was to only write about my engagements with the medical system. So it appeared once every few months when I had an appointment. Then I wrote about the physical recovery. Once the Guardian series gets commissioned the book becomes increasingly meta-textual, to the point where it had to end with the interview in the Epilogue with Sheila Heti, where we’re just unpicking all the memoir’s tropes, the effect the writing had on my own life, all that kind of stuff."

"This novel was written at the same time that Heti was also working on a book of self-help with her friend Misha Glouberman, who’s also a character in How Should a Person Be? He and Sheila were collaborating on this volume of little short chapters offering reflections on experiences like impostor syndrome but also practical advice, such as how to quit smoking. It’s interesting to me that she was working on that at the same time as she was working on this novel How Should a Person Be? and she’s said that she really saw the two projects as companion pieces. Heti was also inspired by Samuel Smiles, the author of that first Victorian self-help book published in 1859 that I mentioned. A friend gave it to her and she became really interested in the way that Smiles was holding up the lives of these individuals from history as models and exemplars of how to live. What I find so interesting about How Should a Person Be? is the way that the existential quest of the character Sheila—who is also sort of like the author in this autofictional hybrid—is paralleled by the narrative’s quest for the right genre. You see the text working through these different possible genres before it settles on its final autofictional form. It even incorporates skeletal remainders of other genres it’s experimented with, like the aborted play Sheila writes. There’s a compelling parallel being drawn between the search for the right genre and the search for the right style of life or way of living. “There’s a parallel being drawn between the search for the right genre and the search for the right way of living” So much of the modernist tradition of Flaubert and Woolf and others is premised on this desire to remain aloof from the popular tastes and practical interests of everyday readers. And Heti explicitly positions her narrative against that, and says, ‘Yeah, I’ve thought about Flaubert, I’ve thought about impersonality and detachment and all that, and I want this book to be the opposite of all of those things.’ So again, we see this desire to embrace a lot of the tendencies that earlier literature had really been premised on suppressing or counteracting, particularly in terms of these more practical desires of readers. Yes. I think the moral trajectory of many of these narratives, Heti and also Hamid and I think others too, is showing the author/protagonist coming to actually purge themselves of the self-help axioms, values and ideals that they’ve inherited and absorbed through the culture. In the Hamid, we saw how he ends up embracing family and connection and human bonds and communities as an antidote to the ruthless desire for wealth and success. Sheila meanwhile learns to purge herself of the need to always please other people and to suppress the uglier parts of life and her identity. That’s embodied by her eventual embrace of this self-help motto ‘Who cares?’ which Sheila ends up embracing as a principle for life—a way of ridding herself of the baggage of a lot of this history of self-belaborment, and the obligation to always try to be improving oneself and adapt oneself to the desires of other people. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . This learning not to care is also a trend that you see in a lot of contemporary self-help. This is the place where the contemporary novel and the latest wave of self-help are actually meeting: in this advice to learn to stop worrying so much about what other people think or about social standards or social conformity, and to learn to find your own compass for what’s meaningful and valuable to you about life. There’s a kind of cheekiness to so much of this: both the novels that are using the ‘how-to’ framework but also this self-help that’s writing against its own tradition. At the same time, there’s that line that I love from How Should a Person Be? where Sheila and Margaux decide that good writing is learning to find where the funny is, and I think that’s often true. The question is, are these self-help authors and novelists doing something more than trying to be cheeky, or is that where the joke ends? If that’s it, then the joke falls flat, because it’s not actually that funny, to use a ‘how to’ as a title for a novel. So there must be more to it than that. The cynical reading is that within the self-help genre, it’s just a way of trying to renew a field that’s come to attract a lot of resistance and skepticism; these industries always need to find ways of keeping themselves relevant and evading the growing skepticism of readers who are perhaps tired of being inundated with advice and directives about how to live. “These industries always need to find ways of keeping themselves relevant” But on the other hand. I think it’s also possible to read it more optimistically as a sign of the genre actually improving, and of it becoming more self-aware about the limits and consequences of the tradition of conventional self-help. And of a genre interested in opening itself up to more ambiguity and other kinds of insight, including literary insight, and other modes of being in the world that conventional self-help leaves out. Heti herself has a great line in an interview where she says that when men ask the question of ‘How should a person be?’ in a novel, it’s considered this great existentialist exploration of weighty philosophical problems, but when a woman does it, it’s dismissed as navel-gazing, narcissistic or puerile. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. The same reception was seen with her next book Motherhood as well. Part of it may be that she’s really laying bare her own ambition in that book. She’s showing her own desire to be famous, a genius, a celebrity. That’s something that everyone feels, I suppose, but a feeling that people are supposed to keep to themselves or hide. But I do think there’s a double standard there: we’re used to characters like Stephen Dedalus wanting to forge the uncreated conscience of their race, or even somebody like Knausgaard wanting to write a great magnum opus. They seem to have a lot more liberty to explore the workings of their inner minds and their aesthetic ambitions than many of these women artists, like Heti."