How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
I’m nearly finished with this one, and it has been a thought-provoking read. I wasn’t sure I liked it at first; in fact, there were times I wanted to slap the main character for being narcissistic and immature and completely self-involved, but then I realized that was the whole point. If you read it, try starting with the attitude of irony — that the author is exposing her own (and many human) vulnerabilities and ugliness through the exposure of her semi-autobiographical story. It makes me cringe when I relate to certain parts, because it makes me uncomfortable in an important way, in an Oh God, that’s me, Oh God, is that me?!! kind of way.
I found a lot of humor throughout this book, but chapter 9, What is Cheating? really got to me. It’s not about cheating in the relationship sense, but rather the human sense: how the human treats itself, which is often (I’m thinking of social media, blogging, instagram, etc.) as an object. The idea of this objectification coming not from the outside (although that is certainly true for women), but the inside, in the sense that we treat ourselves as objects to be desired. And in this sense, we are missing what it means to be human, to be like other humans and the be empathetic to all other humans, but moreover, we are cheating ourselves and our own experience of what it is to be human and alive during this time.
“When we try to turn ourselves into a beautiful object, it is because we mistakenly consider ourselves to be an object, when a human being is really the other two: a gesture, and a reproduction of the human type… Instead of being, one appears to be. And the cheater breaks her own heart.”
There are pieces of this book that I didn’t love, but I think the overall questions it raises about art and creative pursuits and self-involvement and even female friendship (and growing up within that frame) make it well worth the read.