How Should a Person Be? made such a splash when it was published, and I certainly had every intention of reading it, but as the Heti hysteria died down I sort of forgot about it until it was suggested by a girlfriend for our Book Club selection. I’m really glad I got the reminder, because I’ve just devoured it. I hadn’t read anything else by Heti before I got my hands on How Should a Person Be?, and I don’t know that I will necessarily scramble to get any of her future books, only because I loved this so much and don’t expect her future work to resemble it; it is too unique and idiosyncratic and personal for anything else to come close. A part of me wishes that she wouldn’t even try, which is a very cynical viewpoint, I suppose, but I think everyone has had that feeling, of reading a truly, singularly excellent novel, and then avoiding anything else by the same author in order to preserve that impression and experience.
How Should a Person Be? is something of an indescribable novel-memoir-play, but if I had to pin it down, I think I would focus on its core relationship, between Sheila and her closest friend, the painter Margaux Williams (in this case, the lines between fiction and reality are very deliberately blurred). There aren’t enough great books about female friendship, and so many elements of the core relationship felt very authentic to me and forced me to reflect on my own friendships. There is a pervading self-awareness to the novel, which some readers will probably hate; and the constant tension between sincerity and irony feels very millenial generation-esque, and a blurb from Lena Dunham on the back of my paperback copy does not help. (Full disclosure-- I could not be more ambivalent about Lena Dunham; she says something intelligent in an interview, and I think Good for You, Lena Dunahm! and then she inevitably disappoints me by walking around NYC barefoot following the Met Gala. Girl, no. That said, when her forthcoming book finally drops, this should be your only destination for long and hopefully fruitful discussions of it). I would advise you not to get discouraged by its youthfulness; after all, James Wood loved it, and he was born in 1965.