Sheila has no boundaries Margaux has, probably, about the usual amount. There’s a similarity of style, too, a sort of blunt willed innocence, which can occasionally come across as obtuseness in Heti’s case but also is part of her unimpeachable and peculiar charisma.) She and Margaux endure some of the classic vicissitudes of friendship inside a reality show: petty arguments that, at their core, are fought over clashing ideas of what is meant to be shared between two people and their viewing public.
Sheila declares in the prologue that she often thinks the answer to her eponymous question is “a celebrity,” suggesting that she’s one of the people who is “destined to expose every part of themselves so the rest of us can know what it means to be a human,” watching the Paris Hilton sex tape and sensing “a kinship she was just another white girl going through life with her clothes off.” (In her play with the personal and the public, as with her prolificacy across genres and her generosity to other artists working in a variety of media, Heti often recalls the filmmaker Miranda July. The book is structured rather like the universe of “The Hills” (one of Heti’s avowed inspirations) or any other reality TV show: “reality” edited into a mostly traditional narrative shape. So does a compulsive affair with a baker-painter named Israel, a bit like Adam from the TV show Girls but minus the bizarro charm, who tells her the first time they wake up together, “I like to have my cock sucked in the morning.”
Her close but sometimes bruisingly intimate friendship with the artist Margaux Williamson (Heti’s actual collaborator on a number of artistic projects) guides her through a number of personal discoveries but sometimes appears to be a crutch. She is trying to write a play, which she continually quits and picks up again, while supporting herself working in a hair salon. Now Heti has turned the Ticknor treatment on herself in her latest “novel from life.” How Should a Person Be?, based on recorded conversations between Heti and her friends, describes a woman named Sheila making a life in Toronto after leaving her husband, panicking over her own inability to commit to relationships and to projects. The fact that a major newspaper assigned a review of it in 2006 to me, then a semi-employed magazine intern, said plenty about the status of Canadian fiction in the United States, or perhaps of experimental literary fiction generally.
It was also a stylish experiment in literary form. The book was a satire on nineteenth-century biography and an exploration of a twisted and self-flagellating psyche. In it, she told the story of real-life author George Ticknor’s life through his own obsessive mental cycles as he walks to a dinner party thrown by the subject of the biography he has written. SHEILA HETI’S FIRST novel, Ticknor, was tiny and at first glance rambling-but in fact, beautifully composed and orchestrated.
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