Heti’s book is a fictionalised memoir (or “a novel taken from life”, as the cover suggests) featuring Heti, a published author and interviews editor of The Believer, and her band of friends who are artists, writers, playwrights, cultural critics, and musicians. I’d rather that people could be both entertained and given rest while reading my book, than for someone to have to put the book down to take a rest.” You sometimes have to be banal, tedious make the rhythm go soft and slow, give the mind a rest. How Should a Person Be? is accordingly committed to tedium, something that Heti explained in a New York Times interview: “I think stimulation is overrated, and persistent stimulation is exhausting. Life is one long bout of monotony, and then we die. How should a person be in order to create art, in order to create meaningful relationships with other people? It’s a book that seems well aware that the small gestures in pursuit of answers to the big questions of life are often mind-numbingly tedious. Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? is interested in the small gestures that make up human attempts to answer the big questions of life. Sometimes, the market sells us a tepid philosophical novel by a fairly established writer hailed as the current/next big thing. Sometimes, philosophy offers a different way of approaching and thinking about these questions.

Sometimes, art emerges out of this chaos and uncertainty. These answers multiply and proliferate, are argued over and defended within a particular ideology. Big questions on the nature of being, truth, beauty, and meaning tend to invite responses that are simultaneously banal and profound.

How should a person be by sheila heti