Yuri has dyed my hair grey as a thank you for all my hard work in the salon. 1) It will make a change from having it up your own. 2) You let me put my head up your arse.Įmail from me to Sheila. 2) I want you to show off your pussy to a tramp.Įmail from Sheila to Israel.

'I don't think you know anything, after all.'Įmail from Israel to Sheila. 'Let me tell you how a person should be.' 'You sound like you ought to be wise,' I said to an old man called Solomon. I'm going to paint a Buddha and fly to Florida. And I'm exhausted after washing an ugly person's hair. Margaux: Why? Sheila: Because I am now so beyond meta. Margaux: Where are you? Why did you leave without saying goodbye? Sheila: I had to go to New York. 'Just open your mouth and deep-throat me.' I meekly obliged. 'Stop trying to be so fucking deep the whole time,' he said. 'And you sound like you might be a metaphor for a whole tribe,' I answered. I felt the need to patronise some ordinary ugly people by getting a job in a hairdresser that I would only turn up to now and again when I wasn't busy writing. Sholem, too, was trop fatigué after finishing his ugly painting. I fell back, exhausted from having written so many words of my play. Sheila: Does writing like this make me a playwright? Margaux: If you say so. 3) Except when I am too deep to be bothered. 2) But I will spend some time with you as long as I can record everything you say so I can learn from you.

3) Can we hang out together in dirty underpants?Įmail from Sheila to Margaux. That's when I met Margaux, the most brilliant artist I have ever met.Įmail from Margaux to Sheila. I needed to break loose and start writing about writing. I was going to parties merely to be able to write about going to parties. Call it reconstructed reality, or experimentation for the Facebook generation – as knowingly narcissistic as uploading snaps of yourself, with camera-phone held at an attractive angle.On the day of my wedding I wasn't sure if I wanted to be married.

She starts recording her conversations: transcriptions, emails and letters form much of the text. Sheila forms a vital friendship, gets a job in a hair salon, talks to her Jungian analyst, drinks, and has fantastic (and fantastically rude) sex. It features much vague philosophical musing about how to live, how to be a beautiful person, and how to create art, but there's little plot. Lauded across the Atlantic for her meta-fictional experimentation, Heti has been tagged with that fateful label 'voice of a generation' British readers may find that it speaks to them less. It tells a fragmentary first-person story of recently divorced twenty-something Sheila – trying to write a play failing – and her friend Margaux, an artist. Is it fiction? Memoir? A half-arsed play? The Canadian writer Sheila Heti doesn't make clear exactly how much of this supremely self-indulgent book is taken from real life.

How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti