How Should a Person Be?

Sheila is a playwright who cannot write her play. She is in love with her best friend Margaux — or perhaps she is in love with Margaux’s freedom, her talent, the way she exists in the world without apology. She records her conversations without telling people. She pursues relationships she doesn’t fully understand. She asks, over and over, the question that gives the novel its title: how should a person be?

One of the most original and provocative novels of the twenty-first century, How Should a Person Be? arrived in North America to ecstatic and outraged reviews in equal measure — which is usually a sign that a book has done something genuinely new. Heti’s novel blurs the line between fiction and autobiography, between the novel and the philosophical essay, with a radical candour and a lacerating honesty about female ambition, creative paralysis, and the question of what it means to live authentically.

Funny, naked, and utterly unlike anything else on the shelf: this is autofiction at its most daring. It belongs in the same breath as Knausgård and Cusk — but it is entirely its own strange, brilliant thing. Published by Vintage.