How Should a Person Be?

How Should a Person Be?

Series: Anansi Book Club Editions
Written by: Heti, Sheila

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A brilliant portrayal of finding a beautiful life by one of Canada's most exciting literary talents, now available as an Anansi Book Club edition featuring discussion questions.

How Should a Person Be? is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman’s heart and mind, an irresistible torn-from-life book about friendship, art, sex, and love. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part racy confessional, it is a fearless exploration into the way we live now by one of the most highly inventive and thoughtful young writers working today.

A brilliant portrayal of finding a beautiful life by one of Canada's most exciting literary talents, now available as an Anansi Book Club edition featuring discussion questions.

How Should a Person Be? is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman’s heart and mind, an irresistible torn-from-life book about friendship, art, sex, and love. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part racy confessional, it is a fearless exploration into the way we live now by one of the most highly inventive and thoughtful young writers working today.

Published By House of Anansi Press Inc — Apr 5, 2014
Specifications 320 pages | 5 in x 7.75 in
Supporting Resources
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Written By Sheila Heti is the author of five books, including How Should a Person Be?. She lives in Toronto. Visit Sheila Heti's website: http://www.sheilaheti.net/ Visit Sheila Heti's blog: http://sheilaheti.tumblr.com Follow Sheila Heti on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/sheilaheti
Written By
Sheila Heti is the author of five books, including How Should a Person Be?. She lives in Toronto. Visit Sheila Heti's website: http://www.sheilaheti.net/ Visit Sheila Heti's blog: http://sheilaheti.tumblr.com Follow Sheila Heti on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/sheilaheti

Long-listed, ReLit Awards: Novel, 2011

Commended, Huffington Post Best Books, 2012

Commended, New York Times Notable Books, 2012

Long-listed, Women's Prize for Fiction, 2013

Original, contemplative, and often tangential, this is an unorthodox compilation of colorful characters, friendship, and sex that provides an unusual answer to Heti’s question.
Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more -- it's one wild ride. The upfront and unabashed sex makes for a voyeuristic, sometimes hilarious, read. Think HBO's Girls in book form.
...a self-conscious, darkly funny exploration of the strained complexities of female friendship, the makings of bad art, and the finer points of awkward sex...[Heti] celebrates the extraordinary imperfection in ordinary life.
...a portrait of the artist as a young woman, a postmodern self-help book and an autobiography of the mind.
...an unforgettable book: intellectually exacting, unsettling in its fragility, bodily as anything painted by Freud, experimental yet crafted as hell, and yes, very funny.
...the good kind of genre muddle...How Should a Person Be? emerges as part of an entirely different genre: the realistic self-help book. You might not want to follow in Sheila's footsteps, but tagging along on her quixotic mission will be as useful as anything else you're likely to read this year.
Heti flails out in all directions, employing a winsome flexibility and an underlying sadness that deflates any pretension and focuses on the big questions of life. The exuberance of youth is shot through with magic threads of wisdom.
From pithy quotables ('Night fell, but then, there are always holes to fall into,') to the oddly profound ('If now in some ways I drink too much, it's not that I lack a reverence for the world'), this is a novel that rewards reading, sitting with, and rereading.
This is a novel that abounds with [...] wisdom, arrived at in fresh and new ways. For all its inventiveness, there is an old-fashioned integrity, an attention to thought in the prose, resulting in unusual and sharp-eyed observations . . . we are treated to some truly profound ruminations on what it means to be an artist in our indifferent era.
... what Heti’s brain and fingertips offer are expanded possibilities for what the novel can be and can become ... How Should a Person Be? makes curious and combative company.
... one of the bravest, strangest, most original novels I’ve read this year.
[Sheila Heti is] a brilliant, original thinker and an engaging writer.
... vital and funny ...
[I'm] in awe of this new Toronto writer who seems to be channeling Henry Miller one minute and Joan Didion the next.
... boldly original ... [Heti] writes cinematically, but with the cockeyed emotional realism of filmmakers like Miranda July and Lena Dunham.
This is a novel that wonders if the ugly can be beautiful, if there is clarity to be found in the drifting.
How Should a Person Be? reveals a talented young voice of a still inchoate generation.
... bound to be quoted over and over ... Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I can think of.
... brilliant, forthright and sometimes very funny ...
Sheila Heti's vaguely autobiographical new novel might make her the Joan Didion of the 'Girls' generation.
[Heti's] book has a freshness and verve that make you wonder where she will go next.
An engaging mashup of memoir, fiction and philosophy... It doesn't answer the question, how should a person be? But it does find an engaging new way of asking it.
Heti does have a wicked sense of humour and some of her one-liners are genuinely laugh out loud.
... a Joycean experiment ...
Heti is ... capable of arresting sentences that feel utterly now...