Description
Book SynopsisLonglisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2013
Sheila's twenties were going to plan.
So Sheila abandons her marriage and her play, befriends Margaux, a free and untortured painter, and begins sleeping with the dominating Israel, who's a genius at sex but not at art.
Trade ReviewWitty, unusual, raw...a powerful read...
a classic in the making * Stylist *
Original...hilarious... Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's
one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form * Marie Claire *
Amazing -- Lena Dunham
A
shamelessly funny read * Grazia *
Funny, bawdy and fiercely original * Easy Living *
A sharp and unsentimental chronicle of what it is like to be a 20-something now * Economist *
A book that risks everything...
Complex, artfully messy, and hilarious -- Miranda July
Uniquely honest, funny and clever... Heti is
superbly truthful and shockingly funny - no words were minced in the making of this strange, brilliant book -- Kate Saunders * The Times *
Joyously self-conscious…profoundly ironic…or, perhaps more accurately, it is a production profoundly concerned with how to live authentically in a world saturated by irony -- Olivia Laing * New Statesman *
Utterly beguiling: blunt, charming, funny, and smart. Heti subtly weaves together ideas about sex, femininity and artistic ambition. Reading this genre-defying book was
pure pleasure -- David Shields, author of Reality Hunger
Engaging * Guardian *
Genuinely laugh out loud * Daily Mail *
Utterly now -- Claire Allfree * Metro *
Ambitious, assured and ruthlessly controlled…exhilarating -- Richard Beck * Prospect *
How Should a Person Be? is a question to be revisited by the author herself, or another writer, or many other writers – but it’s also the question novels were invented to respond to… Sheila makes it ugly to clear a space: for novels to be less fictional, for women to dream of being geniuses, for a way of being 'honest and transparent and give away nothing' -- Joanna Briggs * London Review of Books *
A timely, gloriously messy, openhearted, clever and beautiful new thing * Dazed & Confused *
An unconventional blur of fact and fiction, How Should a Person Be? is an engaging cocktail of memoir, novel and self-help guide * Grazia *
A candid collection of taped interviews and emails, random notes and daring exposition…fascinating -- Sinead Gleeson * Irish Times *
Provocative, funny and original -- Hannah Rosefield * Literary Review *
A serious work about authenticity, how to lead a moral life and accept one’s own ugliness -- Richard Godwin * Evening Standard *
An exuberantly productive mess, filtered and reorganised after the fact...rather than working within a familiar structure, Heti has gone out to look for things that interest her and "put a fence around" whatever she finds -- Lidija Haas * Times Literary Supplement *
A sharp, witty exploration of relationships, art and celebrity culture -- Natasha Lehrer * Jewish Chronicle *
[Sheila Heti] has an appealing restlessness, a curiosity about new forms, and an attractive freedom from pretentiousness or cant…
How Should a Person Be? offers
a vital and funny picture of the excitements and longueurs of trying to be a young creator in a free, late-capitalist Western City…This talented writer may well have identified a central dialectic of twenty-first-century postmodern being * James Wood, New Yorker *
Funny…odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable…Sheila Heti does know something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form
unlike any other novel I can think of * New York Times *
Playful, funny... absolutely true * The Paris Review *
Sheila's clever, openhearted commentary will draw wry smiles from readers empathetic to modern life's trials and tribulations -- Eve Commander * Big Issue in the North *
Amusing and original * Mail on Sunday *
