How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

by Sheila Heti

the most apologetic blue—

Commitment looked so beautiful to me, like everything I wanted to be: consistent, wise, loving, and true. I wanted to be an ideal, and believed marrying would make me into the upright, good-inside person I hoped to show the world.

When I got up the next morning, I found, there on the screen, an outline for a play about my life—how it would unfold, decade by decade. Reading it compulsively as the sun came up in the window behind me, I grew incredibly scared. Tears rolled down my cheeks as I absorbed the terrible picture he had painted of my life: vivid and vile and filled with everything his heart and mind knew would hurt me best.

When I was little, I was truly afraid that one day I would grow up and get divorced. As I got older, this fear grew with me, and upon getting engaged, the fear raised an anchor and threw it down in my very center. A fear can feel like a premonition, and so it was with me; before marrying, and once married, I never imagined the happy years that he and I might share. What I felt instead was dread—helpless before our marriage’s inevitable end.

I have always welcomed the hunchbacks with a readiness I can only call justice.

And I had once felt the benevolent operation of destiny in every moment! For most of my life, one thing led to the next. Each step bore its expected fruit. Every coincidence felt preordained. It was like innocence, like floating in syrup. People were brought to me. Luck unfurled at the slightest touch. I had a sense of the inevitability of things as they occurred. Every move felt part of a pattern, more intelligent than I was, and I merely had to step into the designated place. I knew this was my greatest duty—this was me fulfilling my role.

It has long been known to me that certain objects want you as much as you want them. These are the ones that become important, the objects you hold dear.

God, shouldn’t you call upon a woman with great big knockers, who the people will listen to?

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.” I was drunk last night too, when he was telling it to me. I resented the implication that I had been, in the five, six times we had seen each other, any drunker than he had been. 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. We all, anyway, work better when we are drunk, or wake up the next morning,

you have to know where the funny is, and if you know where the funny is, you know everything.

A tall, aloofly handsome Asian man blithely dragged behind him a cabbage on a leash, making his way into and out of the rooms. People noticed, but no one cared.

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.

That casual way of dressing before a woman, slowly and deliberately, with so much attention paid to every little gesture of grooming—though he told me that a man must never dress any better than the woman he is with.

Since all the best artists know where the funny is, I thought if I went to clown school, I might know it too.

Then I woke the next morning, thankful I wasn’t high. I will give up pot because it makes me paranoid. But I will stay close to God because he makes me paranoid.

Sheila’s silver tape recorder and Ben’s silver tape recorder lie opposite each other amid the plates of food like two silver guns.

It is cheating to treat oneself as an object, or as an image to tend to, or as an icon.

We have found that, in our freedom, we have wanted to be like coke to the coke addict, food to the starving person, and the middle of the night to thieves.

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.

And when he smiled it was like mustard on the smile of a wound.

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

I would have to strip every last filament of gold from my skin—all the gold I had put there—and strip the gold from his skin, so that none of the gold on him would reflect onto me, and so none of the gold on me would reflect onto him, so we would be in utter darkness together.

Once you have put a fence around everything you value, then you have the total circle of your heart.