Do you think that Margaux knows something about Sheila that Sheila doesn’t know herself? No one wants to be abandoned, betrayed, and that possibility always exists.ĪR When Margaux is angry at Sheila, she suggests “you’ve learned how a person should be, you’re done with me,” but I didn’t get the sense that Sheila figured it out. Probably for some people in familial bonds, too. Certainly there’s fragility in any non-familial bond. Maybe it’s because they’re women, because maybe it’s the specifics of the kind of people they are, or maybe there’s that in any relationship. SH I guess there’s an undercurrent of fear in their relationship. How does their relationship fit in with an early line in the book, about how women are effusive when they run into each other on the street-so as to say, “Everything is all right between us”? Sheila and Margaux become close friends during the story. I think it felt scary and more dangerous to, which felt right.ĪR Okay. At one point, I tried to do otherwise and it didn’t feel right. Then why did you give the protagonist your own name? SH That is like seeing a ventriloquist with a dummy on their hand with a hideous plastic face that’s modeled after their face and the ventriloquist, “In what way are you different from the dummy on your hand?”ĪR Whoa. They’re not the same thing, but I don’t care.ĪR Can you point to some of the ways they are different?

Throughout, she tries and fails at writing a play, and reflects on what it means to be great, or good, or whatever it is a person is supposed to be.Īdam Robinson Can I refer to you interchangeably with the novel’s “Sheila” character? She travels a lot, and worries that her hopes will leave her forever dissatisfied. Sheila gets a job at a hair salon, goes to clown school, takes drugs. Her friends have a contest to see who can paint the worst painting. She starts a complex friendship with a brilliant painter named Margaux and entwines herself in a hot and profanely profound sex life with a man named Israel. The story follows a character named Sheila as she struggles to find authenticity in her art and her relationships. The structure calls for acrobatic reading, for easy attention that is as nimble as the writing. Her prose is witty, light, and inviting, and the sections of the book-acts, as they’re laid out like a play-change quickly. Heti balances the story with art theory and comedy and self help, sociological insight and philosophy, like a Canadian Mark Twain.

Sheila Heti’s novel, How Should a Person Be?, released June 19th by Henry Holt, is a book that does many things, is many things, fills many spaces, behaves differently than other books.

How should a person be