How Should a Person Be?: A Novel from Life

"Funny...odd, original, and nearly unclassifiable...unlike any novel I can think of."―David Haglund, The New York Times Book Review

"Brutally honest and stylistically inventive, cerebral, and sexy."―San Francisco Chronicle

Named a Book of the Year by

The New York Times Book Review,The New Yorker, San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Flavorpill, The New Republic, The New York Observer, The Huffington Post

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)

By turns loved and reviled upon its U.S. publication, Sheila Heti's "breakthrough novel" (Chris Kraus, Los Angeles Review of Books) is an unabashedly honest and hilarious tour through the unknowable pieces of one woman's heart and mind. Part literary novel, part self-help manual, and part vivid exploration of the artistic and sexual impulse, How Should a Person Be? earned Heti comparisons to Henry Miller, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Flaubert, while shocking and exciting readers with its raw, urgent depiction of female friendship and of the shape of our lives now. Irreverent, brilliant, and completely original, Heti challenges, questions, frustrates, and entertains in equal measure. With urgency and candor she asks: What is the most noble way to love? What kind of person should you be?