Sinopsis

A raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium??”a compulsive read that's like "spending a day with your new best friend" (Bookforum)

Reeling from a failed marriage, Sheila, a twentysomething playwright, finds herself unsure of how to live and create. When Margaux, a talented painter and free spirit, and Israel, a sexy and depraved artist, enter her life, Sheila hopes that through close??”sometimes too close??”observation of her new friend, her new lover, and herself, she might regain her footing in art and life.

Using transcribed conversations, real emails, plus heavy doses of fiction, the brilliant and always innovative Sheila Heti crafts a work that is part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part bawdy confessional. It's a totally shameless and dynamic exploration into the way we live now, which breathes fresh wisdom into the eternal questions: What is the sincerest way to love? What kind of person should you be?

From Bookforum

Heti truly has a startling voice all her own, and a fresh take on fiction and autobiography's overlap. Her mix of hyperreal detail, sweeping gestures from the realm of parable, and self-reflexive distortions leaves us wondering what's real and what's invented. ??” Johanna Fateman

Review

???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.??? ??“ David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review

???[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, The New Yorker

???Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral and sexy, this ??