How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

I know that personality is just an invention of the news media.

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

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 don’t remember what we started off talking about, or who was the funniest that day.

Sometimes she felt bad and confused that she had not gone into politics—which seemed more straightforwardly useful,

With a woman, who was too much the same, it never felt that way. So much had to be earned—but no earnings built up! Trust had to be won from zero at every encounter. That’s the reason you always see women being so effusive with each other—crying out shrilly upon recognizing each other in the street. Women always have to confirm with each other, even after so many years: We are still all right. But in the exaggeration of their effusiveness, you know that things are not all right between them, and that they never will be.

I sat up straight and smiled at everyone in their seats. I wanted all those liars on my side.

I was living in a crummy basement apartment, having just left my marriage and the suffocating feeling of leading a life that was not my own.

I briefly considered leaving Toronto for L.A., but I had a fear that with my soul gone missing, if I left the place we had last been in together, it might not know where to find me if it wanted to return.

how else could I make the universe love me? If I did things badly, I would surely lose all its favors, all its protection—as if the universe would delight in me for being a certain way.

Every morning I woke up beside my husband and looked around to see if the feeling was still there; it always was. And I would get up for the day, exhausted by it already,

It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them.

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!

MARGAUX (laughing) It’s just an autobiography. Sheila puts her head in her hands. SHEILA I know, I know! But my life keeps changing. My life keeps changing!

everything was polished wood and semiformal and awful.

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.

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.

May the Lord have mercy on me for I am a fucking idiot.

For we are all, all of us, drunk all the time, and it’s not fair for him to single me out like that and make me the exception, when if it comes to the drinking habits in the circles I run in, I am the rule. The rule is: drink as much as you can afford to drink.

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.

He typed Zarathustra? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!

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.

Then I watched, the morning we were to board public transit to the airport, as Margaux stuffed three oil paintings packed in bubble wrap into her large duffel bag, along with twenty T-shirts. We were only going for three days.

Sitting up front, across from a seat labeled IN MEMORY OF ROSA PARKS,

“Of course! She leans in to kiss you, but she doesn’t kiss me. Connecticut! All the Connecticut bitches hate me!”

Watching her, I felt a kinship; she was just another white girl going through life with her clothes off.

To lack an overwhelming empathy. I sometimes feel pretty paralyzed by my own feelings of empathy. And it’s still such a problem—shame. Maybe what I want in my life is to cut out a bit of the empathy and a bit of the shame.

Below it was a quote from Andy Warhol: Everybody’s sense of beauty is different from everybody else’s. I asked Margaux what she thought the quote meant. Glancing at it, she grimaced. “Oh yeah. It’s saying you can be rich and stupid about art. You’re all welcome.”

Now the three of us were walking through the streets, along with all the women in their tight skirts and cleavage and tans and makeup and high heels, who were holding on to their big, bulky boyfriends for balance.

When I got off the phone, I made a new rule for myself: that I would never again take his call—or, anyway, not until I finished my play—so never.

All I’m saying is: if there’s a pool and people are in the pool and you’re not in the pool, you want to be in the pool just like those people in the pool. It’s just a fact of nature.

After ten minutes, Margaux can be heard asking me, Are you awake? I wasn’t, but I gave a little grunt to show that I was.

Why are you all reading? I don’t understand this reading business when there is so much fucking to be done.

Blessed is he who leaves in the morning without any promise of love.

boundaries, Sheila. Barriers. We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them.”

“I remember being told in kindergarten not to talk too much,” I told him. “My teacher called me a chatterbox.” “Wow,” Ryan said. “I don’t have any traumatic stories like that.”

We didn’t feel the need to call each other that day, and normally Margaux and I talked minimum once, for reassurance.

The professor’s voice was amplified with her mike. “In the nineteenth century—” The nineteenth century, I thought, snickering.

didn’t envy the teenage girls in their tight jeans with the curve of their round asses showing beneath their puffy jackets. They walked through the snow with their girlfriends who dressed alike, their hair hanging below their shoulders, shopping bags in hand. I regarded them like deer or any natural phenomena—not designed specifically to please me, but pleasing all the same.

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

I untangle myself from the sheets and get up and go to the mirror to start my day. I produce a haughty, superior expression to intimidate myself into thinking I’m cool, cooler than I am.

4. I know it is a bad time for my daughter. But it’s been a bad time for her ever since she moved out.

and I do understand. It is a very low priority. But it is not a low priority for me.

anything. I can barely keep up the standard of living I need. The idea of adding to that a concern for others and making time for others is really daunting.

All the white men I know are going to Africa. They want to tell the stories of African women. They are so serious. They lectured me about my lack of morality.

How can these artists we read about—who have been married five or six times—how can they have enough time for all that life, and also make art? MARGAUX And have a heroin addiction?

I thought of apologizing—but couldn’t. Women apologize too much, I once decided, and made myself stop, and now found it incredibly difficult to tell anyone I was sorry.

I continue to write soul as sould. It is my only consistent typo. My unease about it goes so deep that I try never to speak about it to anyone. Every time I write that word, I quickly erase the d and try not to think about it anymore. It’s like when you hit a bird on an empty street at night—you just fix your eyes straight ahead and keep driving. No one saw you; it’s between you and the bird. There’s nothing to be done about it now—it happened.

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.

I sat there with the book on my knees, moving carefully through the pages with a pink highlighting pen and a yellow one, like a beautiful, anxious, pregnant young mother studying for her medical school exams.