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Her two most recent novels, “ Motherhood,” about a woman’s decision whether to have a child, and “How Should a Person Be?,” feature protagonists who are Canadian writers. Heti, the author of 10 books, is accustomed to borrowing from her own life to feed her fiction. “I’ve never had a book unfold for me in such a surprising way,” she said. It wasn’t until she looked back at what she wrote months later that she realized it belonged in what became “Pure Colour.” (Heti is writing a limited-run newsletter for The Times’s Opinion section based on her diary entries from the past decade.) In 2018, as she was drafting “Pure Colour,” her father died, and she began writing about her experiences and emotions in longhand, separate from the novel.

The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.Heti did not intend to write a book about loss. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. Heti's book is pretty ugly fiction - accent on the pretty.īLOCK: That's Alan Cheuse recommending Sheila Heti's new novel "How Should a Person Be?"Ĭopyright © 2012 NPR. I read this eccentric book in one sitting, amazed, disgusted, intrigued, sometimes titillated I'll admit to that, but always in awe of this new Toronto writer who seems to be channeling Henry Miller one minute and Joan Didion the next. They are destined to expose every part of themselves, so the rest of us can know what it means to be human. They are the ones who live their lives not just as people but as examples of people.

Then there are those who cannot put them on. And even if they wanted to, couldn't take them off. Most people, she writes, live their entire lives with their clothes on. Here's a sample of Heti's philosophy from this book. Sheila Heti seems to have done them one better in this book, making an ugly confessional novel both funny and pathetic, heroic and unassuming at the same time.

Meanwhile, her painter friends up in Toronto are taking part in an ugly painting contest, trying to make the ugliest canvas the most talented of them can produce. She's trying to write a play and not doing all that well with it. The narrator, named after the author, creates an intensely personal and ribald and down and dirty investigation of her life as a writer, as a wife and then as a young divorced woman, as a lover and as a devoted, if sometimes disturbing, friend. A novel from life, as Sheila Heti calls it. It's called "How Should a Person Be?" Here's Alan Cheuse with our review.ĪLAN CHEUSE, BYLINE: Here's the most interesting, if ungainly, novel I've read recently. The young Toronto-based writer Sheila Heti has a new novel out. From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.