Although the friendship remains platonic, a combination of mutual shyness, admiration and awkward silences makes the process feel like a courtship.
And I went straight for it, like a cripple goes for a cane.” Yet her marriage drains her life force, her good luck and her sense of destiny, so much so that when she finally moves into her own apartment, she bemoans the fact that “No amount of work could compensate for what I had lost since my decision to marry - a feeling of ease, of having some direction in the world.” It even contributes to her writer’s block by impeding her ability to think about the subject of her play, women, because “the whole time I was married, I thought only about men - my husband in particular.”Īs her marriage ends, Sheila’s connection with Margaux deepens. The fictional Sheila blames the breakup on her own misguided ideas about commitment: “I thought about marriage day and night. The demands of fiction notwithstanding, however, the novel can’t have been an easy read for him at times (in a recent essay he writes of the intensity of being “sampled” in the service of art). Wilson, who also has a bit part in Teenager Hamlet, has been a stalwart public supporter of his ex. The novel begins in the aftermath of the dissolution of Sheila’s marriage to her husband, who in real life is the music critic and author Carl Wilson. The book and the film were in fact launched together along with an album by the musician and poet Ryan Kamstra, who completes the trinity with by appearing in all three works. The two also collaborated on Williamson’s recent film, Teenager Hamlet.
Large passages are made up of transcribed conversations and emails between Heti and her artist friends, including, most significantly, the painter Margaux Williamson. It may be suspiciously close, however, to a roman à clef. It’s easy to get lost in the meta-ness of it all and imagine also that the wide critical acclaim Heti received for her first two books, the short story collection The Middle Stories and the novel Ticknor, which effectively declared her the Future of Interesting Writing in Canada, added to the pressure of producing this novel.Īlthough the protagonist of How Should A Person Be? is someone called Sheila Heti, the author has indicated that it contains enough fiction to stop it being a memoir. Sheila Heti’s latest does its best to flout, sometimes lavishly, standard definitions of plot, character and form - plus fiction versus reality.īut at the heart of this flouting is a theme almost sweetly banal in its simplicity: writer’s block, in this case a malady brought on by Heti’s attempts to fulfill a commission to write a play. How should a novel be? Despite centuries of prodding and experimentation, most people still have fairly entrenched opinions about this.
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