How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

Her mother started yelling, and her sister started crying. Then, from over in the high chair, they heard little Margaux going, Who cares? 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.

The other night out at the bars, I learned that Nietzsche wrote on a typewriter. It is unbelievable to me, and I no longer feel that his philosophy has the same validity or aura of truth that it formerly did. No other detail of his life situating him so squarely in the modern age could have affected me as much as learning this. He typed Zarathustra? Goddamnit, the man had no more connection to the truth than a stenographer!

Yet the three ways the art impulse can manifest itself are: as an object, like a painting; as a gesture; and as a reproduction, such as a book. When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type.

Sheila wakes to an email from Margaux … 1. i have been thinking: we’re both unusually free people, but i think we have different mechanisms for being free. 2. with you, it’s like you never believe you have any effect on people. maybe you don’t think you’re a person because you haven’t decided what sort of person to be. 3. you always think no one can see you, which of course gives you the crazy freedom that lets you do whatever you want to. 4. for me, i always moved around a lot as a kid, so i never had any physical or recorded evidence of anything to do with the past. all my life i felt no restraint from anything in my past because it literally wasn’t there. 5. when i was younger and i first started to be in the papers, no matter how small or mundane the media source, no matter how banal or positive the review was, i would see my name there and feel a weight of doom that would last about a week. it was just this mix of panic, depression, and anxiety that i couldn’t escape or talk myself out of until it wore away.