I'm not saying that is exactly what is happening here, but maybe I am. I create a fictional balance for the potential boredom of the real. I say this as I do the same in my own writing. This is a part of the new fiction, where there is a blurry line, if a line at all, around the context of our lives wrapped up in the bow of fiction. Perhaps everything I love is because she is building it around her inability to write. Her ongoing blahblahblah about not being able to write a play gets in the way of everything I love about the book.

As a reader I was at once stunned by the great writing, then put off by some of the content. Then again, that is part of the beauty and part of the complication with this book. Sure it tastes good, but there really isn’t much sustenance.Įvery page has a great quote, it's just I don't believe in every one of them. I was firmly in the teeth, but with Heti, I am often picked out like stray corn off the cob, only to be looked at and reconsidered, popped back in the mouth and stuck again, only for the cycle to repeat itself.

I mean, come on, did anybody really give a shit that he called it a novel when it was a distorted memoir? Why does Sheila get away with it? At least Frey’s book was solid writing throughout. Why does a book have to be labelled? Is it for the bookseller, being in such a state that all the part timers can’t be bothered to know their merchandise well enough to properly sort it? Is it that the fault of people like Oprah and James Frey, for pulling off the wool over the reader’s eyes.

I would be just as happy, more so even, if the publishers just dropped the label altogether. Either have the balls to go all out memoir or just write a novel. I have a hard time caring about a memoir being labelled a novel.

It says 'novel' on the cover but is described as a memoir. (For perspective, I'm a math major though I write in my free time, I'd hardly consider anything I work on important, let alone 'world-changing' as Sheila in the novel puts it.I don't understand fiction anymore. I see the characters as such ridiculous figures, spending no real time working and calling leisure work. I cannot connect with this book in any meaningful way, certainly not enough to write a paper on it. There are chapters about her cocaine-fueled nights and her inability to finish her play, which she sees as a really big deal. My question is, what is the purpose to this book? Her thoughts seem so pretentious and self-important, while her actions are submissive and traditional (think 'interlude for fucking', primarily). The book, in a sentence, is a fictional semi-biography exploring the life of Sheila, a young playwright, and her friends and peers. Hi guys, so for a seminar class in college I was assigned to read the book 'How Should a Person Be?' by Sheila Heti.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti