How Should A Person Be?

Sheila, a playwright living in Toronto, asks the question early on: How Should A Person Be? And spends the rest of the novel refusing to answer it while the people around her give her the best and worst possible avenues to a solution. Sheila, the playwright, is a thinly-veiled cipher for Sheila Heti, the author, and given the book's interesting counter-play between art and life and how they intertwine, overlap, copulate and inspire, this becomes a brilliant meta-fiction treatise on life imitating art. It's perhaps, then, distracting to wonder about Sheila Heti, the author, and her own friendship group and casual encounters. Because the book, as a standalone piece about friendship and being a woman, offers up brilliant passages on everything from love to sex to how to be with those closest to you.

There isn't much plot to speak of. This is almost ambient fiction. It moves from one scene to another, without much progression, but that is part of the way it mirrors real life. We don't have big revelations and sudden reversals of fortune. We live and love and we make mistakes and things change slowly and subtly. Sheila, the playwright, has been commissioned to write a play. She thinks it should be about 'how a person should be'. She starts recording conversations with her best friend, Margaux, an artist, and they send endless emails to each other picking apart small arguments and interactions with others. She spends time with someone who could be the wrong man, such is his command over her, and in the background is a competition amongst her friends to produce the worst piece of art ever.

There is much to admire here. The book is funny, it's brave in its form - the meta-representations of real life, the ambient attention to narrative storytelling, it's sad, it's depressing, it's warm and it wears its heart tucked inside its sleeve, like a tissue sodden with tears. It's a brilliantly put together book.