A novel from life: a raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friendship, sex, and love in the new millennium

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 New York Times [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, New Yorker Utterly beguiling: blunt, charming, funny, and smart. Heti subtly weaves together ideas about sex, femininity and artistic ambition. Reading this genre-defying book was pure pleasure David Shields, author of Reality Hunger Original...hilarious...Part confessional, part play, part novel, and more-it's one wild ride...Think HBO'S Girls in book form Marie Claire Heti is taking a hard look at what makes life meaningful and how one doesn't end up loveless and lost. It is book peopled by twentysomethings but works easily as a manual for anyone who happens to have run into a spiritual wall The Paris Review

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction, including The Middle Stories and Ticknor, and a book of "conversational philosophy" called The Chairs Are Where the People Go, written with Misha Glouberman, which was chosen by The New Yorker as a best book of 2011. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Bookforum, McSweeney's, n+1, The Guardian, and other places. She works as interviews editor at The Believer magazine and lives in Toronto.