How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

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.