How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.

These are from a really exciting book called How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.

This is not my favorite book in the history of the world, but it is doing some interesting work which I appreciate and Heti writes well. It is one of those “auto-fictions” kind of a fictionalized version of the author’s own life. You can never quite trust in what is true and what isn’t. I’m always kind of uncomfortable with those, even though I have written a couple of them. They often seem sort of lazy to me. I would never call this book lazy, but I might think it once in a while.

So, I guess, let me say this: if you like or appreciate the project that is Lena Dunham’s Girls, then you will probably enjoy this book and want to keep it on your nightstand. If, on the other hand, you find Girls to be a spoiled, mildly narcissistic, privileged white girl riff on how hard life is a white-washed metropolis, then you should still read this book, you just might not like it as much.

This book presents a version of the contemporary woman’s life which is very different (and probably more true) than anything else I have ever read.

(pg 2)

“I know that inside the body there is just temperature.”

(pg 2)

“To go on and on about your soul is to miss the whole point of life. I could say that with more certainty if I knew the whole point of life. To worry too much about Oscar Wilde and Andy Warhol is just a lot of vanity.”

(pg 3)

We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists. Every era has its art form.”

(pg 28)

“Instead, we smoked together quietly, and as she exhaled, the trees touched each other’s branches in the wind.”

(pg 169)

How can these artists we read about - who have been married five or six times - how can they have enough time for all that life, and make art?

(pg 175)

Buddha was the one who turned his back on the suffering of the world to sweeten himself with good feelings - privileged feelings of benevolence and purity”.

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