![]() Her close but sometimes bruisingly intimate friendship with the artist Margaux Williamson (Heti’s actual collaborator on a number of artistic projects) guides her through a number of personal discoveries but sometimes appears to be a crutch. ![]() She is trying to write a play, which she continually quits and picks up again, while supporting herself working in a hair salon. Now Heti has turned the Ticknor treatment on herself in her latest “novel from life.” How Should a Person Be?, based on recorded conversations between Heti and her friends, describes a woman named Sheila making a life in Toronto after leaving her husband, panicking over her own inability to commit to relationships and to projects. The fact that a major newspaper assigned a review of it in 2006 to me, then a semi-employed magazine intern, said plenty about the status of Canadian fiction in the United States, or perhaps of experimental literary fiction generally. It was also a stylish experiment in literary form. The book was a satire on nineteenth-century biography and an exploration of a twisted and self-flagellating psyche. ![]() In it, she told the story of real-life author George Ticknor’s life through his own obsessive mental cycles as he walks to a dinner party thrown by the subject of the biography he has written. ![]() SHEILA HETI’S FIRST novel, Ticknor, was tiny and at first glance rambling-but in fact, beautifully composed and orchestrated. ![]()
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