Author of the week: Sheila Heti

last updated 8 January 2015

Sheila Heti has written a novel that has an odd relationship with reality, said John Williams in NYTimes.com. How Should a Person Be?, the Toronto writer’s fifth book, was assembled in part from email exchanges and recorded conversations that she had with some well-known friends— including painter Margaux Williamson and writer Misha Glouberman. Often raw in its language and episodic in structure, it’s essentially a portrait of life among a group of self-involved Toronto artists, and it did cause some stress in Heti’s friendships. “We had endless conversations about it,” she says. “That talking was very important. There were some bad reactions, in some moments, but not as many as you might think, and in the end we were all okay.”

Reality television and documentaries helped shape her approach, said Claire Cameron in TheMillions.com. “I was thinking about movies made by Werner Herzog and TV shows like The Hills,” the author says. But she didn’t want the trash drama of TV; she says she tried in earnest to address the question posed by the book’s title. To do so meant facing her doubts about her life and her writing. She showed an early draft of the book to Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, who told her a story about a famous writer who achieved success only after throwing out the first novel he completed. “He said, ‘Maybe this is that book for you,’” says Heti. Crushed, she put it in a drawer before finally committing to revising. “I couldn’t accept that a drawer was the fate of this book.”