How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time. I

I just do what I can not to gag too much. I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat. At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock. I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking. Soon, the vomit was gone, and then my boyfriend pulled me up to kiss me.

them trying to talk themselves up all the time. I laugh when they

For so many years I have written soul like this: sould. I make no other consistent typo. A girl I met in France once said, Cheer up! Maybe it doesn’t actually mean you’ve sold your soul—I was staring unhappily into my beer—but rather that you never had a soul to sell. We

said to myself sternly, It’s time to stop asking questions of other people. It is time to just go into a cocoon and spin your soul.

have read all the books, and I know what they say: You—but better in every way! And yet there are so many ways of being better, and these ways can contradict each other!

I’m sorry, but I’m really glad she’s my best friend. If I had known, when I was a baby, that in America there was a baby who was throwing up her hands and saying, first words out of her mouth, Who cares? and that one day she’d be my best friend, I would have relaxed for the next twenty-three years, not a single care in the world.

What would my painting look like? How would I proceed? I thought it would be a simple, interesting thing to do. I had spent so much time trying to make the play I was writing—and my life, and my self—into an object of beauty. It was exhausting and all that I knew.

and would go to art parties and talk about painters and the importance of painting, and would speak confidently about brushstroke and color and line, and would do coke and be sensitive and brutish. On his forearms were tattooed twelve-point letters—the initials of local women artists he had loved, none of whom would speak to him anymore.

For so long I had been looking hard into every person I met, hoping I might discover in them all the thoughts and feelings I hoped life would give me, but hadn’t. There are some people who say you have to find such things in yourself, that you cannot count on anyone to supply even the smallest crumb that your life lacks. Although I knew this might be true, it didn’t prevent me from looking anyway. Who cares what people say? What people say has no effect on your heart.

But once I was married, my relationship to my destiny began to change. The signs grew more obscure. It was not enough to read them once. I had to consult them again and again to try and figure out the best direction, which would lead me down a path to an end I could admire.

Balance masks flaws,” he told me. I wanted to write this on my arm. Beauty is balance—yes! As much in a haircut, as in a work of art, as in a human being. As

I felt like I was with a new lover—one that would burrow into my deepest recesses, seek out the empty places inside me, and create a warm home for me there. I wanted to touch every part of it, to understand how it worked. I began to learn what turned it on and the things that turned it off.

Most people live their entire lives with their clothes on, and even if they wanted to, couldn’t take them off. Then there are those who cannot put them on. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human. Most people lead their private lives. They have been given a natural modesty that feels to them like morality, but it’s not—it’s luck. They shake their heads at the people with their clothes off rather than learning about human life from their example, but they are wrong to act so superior. Some of us have to be naked, so the rest can be exempted by fate.

Standing alone at the bar, I wondered if I could love the boy I noticed at the end of it—the one with the curly brown hair, who was like a washed-out, more neutral version of the first boy I loved. When he stepped out onto the front steps, I thought, If he has gone out there to smoke, I will love him. But when I got outside, though I could see a cigarette dangling from his lips, I did not love him.