How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

How should a person be? For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. I was always watching to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too. I noticed the way people dressed, the way they treated their lovers—in everyone, there was something to envy.

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

I said that a few years ago I had looked around at my life and realized that all the ugly people had been weeded out.

He started the composition smack-dab in the middle of a piece of paper, since paper is uglier than canvas.

He made the background a gross pinkish-brownish gray, using mineral sediment dug up from the bottom of the jar in which he washed his brushes.

Though he thought in the end there would be some salvageable qualities to the painting, it just kept getting more and more disgusting until finally he began to feel so awful that he finished it off quickly.

Dipping a thick brush in black paint, he wrote at the bottom, really carelessly, The s...

Then he stepped back and looked at the result, and found it so revolting that he had to get it out of his studio, and le...

From there, the day just got worse. Making the painting had set off a train of really depressing and terrible thoughts, so that by the time evening came, he was fully plunged in despair. Jon returned home, and Sholem started following him around the apartment, whining and complaining about everything.

It’s like you work so hard to train a dog to be good! he called through the door. And the dog is your hand! Then one day you’re forced to beat all the goodness out of

that dog in order to make it cruel. That day was today!

This project fills me with shame and self-loathing. I just did my ugly painting, and I feel like I raped myself. How’s yours, Margaux? Margaux, the better artist, wrote back: i spent all day on my bed island reading the new york times.

Sometimes she felt bad and confused that she had not gone into politics—which seemed more straightforwardly useful, and which she thought she was probably well suited for, having something of the dictator inside, or something of the dictator’s terrible certainty.

“He’s just another man who wants to teach me something,” she said.

present situation. But that’s cheating! And cheating’s bad for an artist. It’s bad in life—but it’s really bad in art.”

He did only the things he was good at, and the things that gave him pleasure.

Several years ago, when I was engaged to be married but afraid to go through with it—afraid that I would end up divorced like my parents, and not wanting to make a big mistake—I had gone to Misha with my concerns.

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

So I took what he said to heart and got married. Three years later I was divorced.

In the final scene I kneeled in a dumpster—a used-up whore, toothless, with a pussy as sour as sour milk—weakly giving a Nazi a blow job, the final bit of love I could squeeze from the world. I asked the Nazi, the last bubble of hope in my heart floating up, Are you mine? to which he replied, Sure, baby, then turned around and, using his hand, cruelly stuck my nose in his hairy ass and shat. The end.

This was now my favorite part of the party.

A feminist theater company had commissioned me to write it during my first year of marriage, and my only question had been, “Does it have to be a feminist play?” “No,” they said, “but it has to be about women.”

But once I was married, my relationship to my destiny began to change.

Since the beginning, there had been an empathy between me and my husband; there had always been a sweetness. It was like we were afraid of breaking the other.

Would you rather shit in the toilet or on the floor?

Of all the people in the world, hairdressers were the people most like me.

saying, “I know all the secrets of the Western world—but I’ll never tell!” The secrets of the Western world! I had found my kin.

The days I spent at home, working on my play, were miserable days; I longed to be at the salon. When I was at the salon, I wished to be nowhere else.

“I have decided to teach you everything I know.” I bowed my head in gratitude.

Though I had vowed not to spend more than seven dollars a day, since I was hardly making any money, I went into the store. I actually rushed in, as though everyone else in the city was about to have the same idea as me. I asked the old man what the tape recorder cost, knowing full well that I would buy it, no matter what it cost. I gave him my credit card and signed a slip of paper on which I promised to pay one hundred and twenty-nine dollars and thirty-two cents.

SHEILA I’m not looking to you for answers! Why would you say that? I was just hoping that if I— MARGAUX Don’t you know that what I fear most is my words floating separate from my body? You there with that tape recorder is the scariest thing!

I had met Israel once before, several years ago, and I never forgot it. I was married at the time and was going down in an elevator in a building of artists’ studios. He entered on the same floor and stood there beside me. He had killer eyes, huge, jaded, soul-sucking eyes, a nice and lazy smile, big thick lashes, and the lips of a real pervert.

In that moment, I felt aware in my body of how difficult it would be to cross that distance to get to him.

I startled myself by saying, “I’m celibate right now.” His eyes came alive in a different way, and his grin was the grin of a bear. “So you’re one of those people,” he said. “One of what people?” “One of those people who think they can control themselves.”

He disagreed with me when I said you could love anyone. “No you can’t,” he said. “It matters—the person that you’re with.”

They must reinforce and build on what is in their life already rather than always starting anew, hoping to find a situation without danger.

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

the end of every experience, so they cut themselves off at the beginning, retreating almost at once i...

I am writing a play. I am writing a play that is going to save the world. If it only saves three people, I will not be happy.

May the Lord have mercy on me for I am a fucking idiot. But I live in a culture of fucking idiots. I cannot be saved if not everyone is saved.

And I know I’m not, so no one is.

Last night someone said to me, “Come on—all the five, six times I have seen you, you have been drunk out of your mind.”

Today I am fasting. A girl I know who is a semifamous singer, and who is very slender and glamorous in pictures, once told me that when she has been eating badly, she will fast for a day or two.

She said that Nietzsche made her think that her self-denial and need for purification were vulgar bullshit, but then she said no to Nietzsche—she sees no reason she shouldn’t enjoy emptying out, the same as she enjoys exploiting abundance.

I turned and saw Margaux coming down the alley. She was pushing something on a trolley in front of her, and as she got closer I saw it was a tree—a baby tree in a pot!

I think it would be less emotionally complicated if I was raising society’s child.

Inside, Margaux pointed to a pile of papers on my desk, which were labelled on top with a black marker, Margaux. “What’s that?” she asked. “Our conversations,” I said. Margaux was quiet. She went to wait by the stairs.

She said she had been working on a painting of me in a pool before she left her house that night, based on the naked photos she had taken of me in the whirlpool at the Y. Did I want to see it? Of course I did! All my life I had dreamed of being friends with a painter who would make me into an icon that people would admire.

Alone in our studio, sitting before my computer, I was determined to finish my play, but instead I grew distracted and stared out the window.