How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

How should a person be?

We tried not to smile, for smiling only encourages men to bore you and waste your time.

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

There are certain people who do not feel like they were raised by wolves, and they are the ones who make the world tick. They are the ones who keep everything functioning so the rest of us can worry about what sort of person we should be. I have read all the books, and I know what they say: You—but better in every way!

When I arrived, he was in his study, at his computer, worrying over his life by checking his email.

“The only thing I ever understood is that everyone should make the big mistakes.”

would make me into the upright, good-inside person I hoped to show the world. Maybe it would correct my flightiness, confusion, and selfishness, which I despised, and which ever revealed my lack of unity inside.

We don’t know the effects we have on each other, but we have them.

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.

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.

This response is typical of all puers. Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it’s their everlasting switching that’s the dangerous thing, not what they choose.

Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful. And yet they started off believing themselves too special for this world!

The answer for them is to build on what they have begun and not abandon their plans as soon as things start getting difficult. They must work—without escaping into fantasies about being the person who worked.

they must choose work that begins and ends in a passion, a question that is gnawing at their guts, which is not to be avoided but must be realized and lived through the hard work and suffering that inevitably comes with the process.

They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger. Puers don’t need to check themselves into analysis. If they can just remember this—It is their everlasting switching that is the dangerous thing, not what they choose—they might discover themselves saved. The problem is the puer ever anticipates loss, disappointment, and suffering—which they foresee at the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once in order to protect themselves. In this way, they never give themselves to life—living in constant dread of the end. Reason, in this case, has taken too much from life.

They must give themselves completely to the experience! One thinks sometimes how much more alive such people would be if they suffered! If they can’t be happy, let them at least be unhappy—really, really unhappy for once, and then they might become truly human.

There’s so much beauty in this world that it’s hard to begin. There are no words with which to express my gratitude at having been given this one chance to live—if not Live.

We were walking through the dirty snow—snow gone bad from three months of pissing dogs and cars.

Night fell, but then, there are always holes to fall into.

When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven’t said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I’ve made for myself that I don’t follow—I see that I’ve done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I. In fact, apart from being the only person living in this apartment, I’m not sure what distinguishes me.

So it should not be so hard to come at this life with a little bit of honesty. I don’t need to be great like the leader of the Christian people. I can be a bumbling murderous coward like the king of the Jews.

Not a single American-born artist had moved outside of America.

“What is American cheese anyway?” I heard one of them say. Her friend replied, “I think it means it has a chemical in it.”

It was so terrible to be alone. I felt how heavy my brain was in my head with all the questions that had been repeating for years.

Better to have your failure right in front of you than the fantasy in your head.

nothing but nothing in my eyes.