How Should a Person Be?

Sheila Heti

This novel breaks the mould. Don’t expect much in the way of plot – instead there are episodes driven by dialogue culled from real life conversations. At the centre is a friendship between two young women who want to become artists. The whole is raw, shocking, sexually very graphic and compelling. You have been warned!

Extract

Destiny became like an opaque, demanding, poorly communicative parent, and I was its child, ever trying to please it, to figure out what it wanted from me. I tried to read its face for clues to understand how it wanted me to behave. In all of this, there was overarching question that never left my mind, an ongoing task that could never be called complete, though I hoped one day it would be: What was the right way to react to people? Who was I to talk to at parties? How was I to be?

Parallels