What women had to say to one another, or how a woman might affect another, I did not know.”Īnd thus begins Heti’s quest. Not only was the plot she’d submitted horribly contrived, she didn’t know anything about women! As she writes: “… the whole time I was married, I was concerned only with men - my husband in particular. As “Sheila,” the protagonist of How Should a Person Be? tells it, she’d been commissioned to write an original play for a Toronto feminist theater company and found that she just couldn’t do it. As a young, married woman writing intelligently and poetically about “serious” subjects that had little to do with her own experience, Heti was poised for a distinguished career as a writer of “difficult” high literary fiction.īut then things broke down. Ticknor, her first novel (a historical fiction revolving around the relation of a 19th-century biographer towards his subject) had just been published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux under then-editor Lorin Stein. Her beautifully crafted short-story collection, The Middle Stories, had been published four years prior. How Should a Person Be? was written from 2005 - when Heti was 28 - through 2012. CANADIAN WRITER SHEILA HETI’S breakthrough novel How Should a Person Be? recounts the author’s faux-epic quest for a personal life or more specifically, a life that will support and engender a kind of writing she can believe in.
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