Sheila Heti: 'I love dirty books'
The
Canadian has become a literary sensation in the US with a novel drawing
heavily on her own life and philosophy. Here she talks about art,
female friendship and sexual honesty
Sheila Heti in New York: 'I'll never write a book in this way again.' Photograph: Mike McGregor for the Observer
Sheila Heti's novel, How Should a Person Be?, has taken the States by storm. Dubbed "HBO's Girls in book form", it's a mash-up of memoir, fiction, self-help and philosophy.
The book, published here this week, has divided critics. The New Yorker's
James Wood applauded Heti's "freedom from pretentiousness and cant",
but called the book "hideously narcissistic". Margaret Atwood described
it as a "seriously strange but funny plunge into the quest for
authenticity"; while artist and film-maker Miranda July declared it
"nothing less than groundbreaking: in form, sexually, relationally, and
as a major literary work".
How Should a Person Be? is structured like a literary version of reality TV. The narrator, Sheila, is a playwright, recently divorced, who is suffering from writer's block. In real life Heti had just divorced her husband of three years, and was trying to write a play for a feminist theatre company – which instead became How Should a Person Be?.
Set in Heti's native Toronto, the book is based on the author's own conversations with her artist friends (the character Margaux is Heti's real friend, painter Margaux Williamson), her analyst and her relationship with Israel, the man with whom she has intense, brutal sex.
But, in the spirit of the 19th-century bildungsroman, the book also asks questions such as: What does it mean to be an artist? What is ugly and what is beautiful? And how do we live a moral life?
Heti studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. Her short-story collection, The Middle Stories, appeared in 2001, then came Ticknor, a historical novel about a 19th-century biographer.
She collaborated with Misha Glouberman on a book of "conversational philosophy", The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which the New Yorker chose as one of its best books of 2011.
Heti looked set for a distinguished career as a writer of "difficult" literary fiction. But How Should a Person Be? was a surprise change of direction, as she plundered her own life. Writing fiction alone in a room, she felt isolated from the world and began taping conversations with friends, and bringing them to life. "It seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story," she told an interviewer in 2007.
Many editors turned the manuscript down – it didn't receive a US release until two years after publication in Canada. But How Should a Person Be? has made her a literary sensation.
Written from 2005 – when Heti was 28 – through to 2012, the book explores the messiness, self-consciousness and doubts of young women who have been told the world offers them unprecedented opportunities, but find themselves working as unpaid interns, living in grimy bedsits and dating loser men.
There are strong links with Lena Dunham's brilliant TV series Girls (Dunham has called Heti one of her favourite writers). Both their heroines have a masochistic sexual relationship that causes pain, but also self-revelation.
Like Dunham, Heti faces criticism for being part of a privileged (white) North American elite; but her writing asks important questions about roles for young women in late-capitalist society, and celebrates the power of female friendship.
In How Should a Person Be? you interview your friends, reproduce their emails. But you call it a work of art, not your journal?
Part of writing this book was "Can I write a book where I'm not the sole author?" Or rather, I am the sole author, but my vision is influenced by what I encounter in the world, and what I learn from other people. The creative process was far more public – I showed it to Margaux and many of my friends, all the way along. I was thinking of open source software and writing a book that had more of that "open source ethos" rather than, say, Microsoft where even the people who understand computers can't break into it because it's so closed. There's an essay on the internet that I was inspired by early on called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". I didn't want to make a cathedral, I wanted the book to be a bazaar.
So it's more colloquial?
Your impulse as a writer is to make the sentences as beautiful as possible, but that wouldn't have made any sense at all for this book. It is like a performance or a monologue; Sheila's talking to you. It has to feel like spoken language. Some people might think I don't know how to write. [Laughs heartily.] But it's just silly that this kind of language should be put beneath literary language. I spent a lot of time capturing the sloppiness of the way people actually talk.
Did you worry about hurting real people by putting them in a book?
I'd never write a book in this way again. I understand why people write fiction now. A lot of complications can arise. Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!
For an autobiographical novel, there's very little about your parents. Can you tell us more?
My dad came to Canada in 1956 from Hungary as a boy, and my mother came in the 1970s when she married my dad. They're both Jews, and my Jewish heritage comes into the book. I don't know how much you know about Hungary, but they were so horrible during the second world war. It's still a very, very antisemitic country, so you tend to feel closer to the Jewish part than the Hungarian part, or you'd be in so much conflict.
Growing up you say you always felt "really afraid" of culture - adding, "I think it's being a child of immigrants".
I wasn't allowed to watch music videos as a kid. It was just that kind of environment. And I felt overwhelmed by pop culture. It was too loud and too much. Before this book I could never have imagined setting a book in the present. I don't really know any more about pop music than I did 10 years ago. I live in a silent world except for conversations and certain podcasts.
And yet the TV series The Hills inspired some of the dialogue for How Should a Person Be?…
I transcribed a few episodes and I was like, "Oh, these characters are talking the way people really talk." It was like Beckett, so open and mysterious. In the first season they didn't talk about anything – there was no subject to their conversation, it was just words, just their relationships.
Are you religious?
One of the first things I started reading when I was working on the book – not that I was quite sure it was a book – was the Bible. I was reading the Old and New Testament and turning emails from friends into text in the manner of biblical passages. I had the idea that Sheila and her friends are wandering in the desert, because this is the generation that doesn't reach the promised land. That's why there's no answer in the end. "How should a person be?" is the question Moses answers for the Jews with the 10 commandments. If Sheila could give the answer, she'd be like Moses. But she has to accept she's not. I'm not a religious person but I do think the biblical stories, like all great stories, continue to resonate in our lives.
Sheila's friendship with Margaux is very important in the book, yet she confesses she had no friends before the age of 25. Was it the same for you? Did you have to learn the art of friendship?
Yes, and I have found it to be a more beautiful art than the art of relationships, because there is enough of a distance. I find that when I'm in a relationship, I'm just so "in it", you couldn't even call it an art, it's such embroilment. With a friendship you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more.
Can you tell me about the photo of you and Margaux, recreating Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, with your friends Ryan and Sholem?
That was really fun. For all my fear of paintings, I love Manet. When he showed his work at the Paris salon, he was criticised for being so sloppy and his work being so ugly – but look at it now, and you think: "What were they talking about?" The way things have changed is because of him, it looks beautiful to us now. I only have one bathing suit so I had to wear that in the photo. For some reason I had to be the girl. I don't think Margaux would have wanted to be it.
The sex scenes are very powerful. Even though Sheila is in a submissive relationship with Israel, there's a muscularity to your writing.
I love Henry Miller and reading people who write well about sex. I love dirty books! I think there's a way of talking about the human that can be quite profound. I tried Fifty Shades of Grey but three pages in I realised I just couldn't read it. It was like every sentence was written by a different writer.
Sheila gradually realises she's in a destructive relationship…
She eventually gets out of it but I wanted to show her lose control; it's also part of her fantasy of wanting other people to tell her how to be – she thinks Israel is going to be this promised land and it turns out to be a place of real destruction and pain.
You say women have more freedom than ever before and yet at the same time we're in a climate that's more degrading to women.
Yes, just in terms of internet porn and stuff like that – that backlash against our freedom. Look at the way these women like Lindsay Lohan are experiencing public shaming. For what? You could say for being brats, but men are brats, too. These women are being made examples of. And I'm not even sure what everyone thinks they've done wrong.
Sheila talks about feeling androgynous at times. Is there a third sex?
I think there are 17 sexes! I even think having children versus not having children is a different sexuality. Having the inclination to be a parent, or not having the inclination, goes that deep. A friend had a baby recently and she said to me: "I feel something is coming over me and I'm not going to be able tell you the truth about my experience."
In the book you debate the nature of female genius - presumably because we haven't enough famous examples yet?
Yes, we've just had a exhibition in Toronto about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And these banners outside the museum said: "He painted for the people; she painted to survive." The implication is he painted the story of his country and she painted her life. You think: "Come on, that's so insulting. She was painting the story of people, too, not just herself."
How do you answer criticism that you write from a position of privilege?
I think we have a lot to feel guilty for; the world is a horrible place for most people. Obviously there's inequity, I think any of us could do better at helping to resolve that in our lives… But art is not social justice. Art is art… Look at Lena [Dunham]. She's just supposed to make the TV show she wants to make. She doesn't have to solve the racial problem in America. Why is the problem between black and white in America laid on Lena Dunham's shoulders? No one made that complaint about Bored to Death, another HBO show about a group of white guys with a writer at the helm. It's so wrong. If people want to complain that HBO doesn't have enough shows directed by black women, I would agree. But let's not put that on Lena.
Will there be a film of How Should a Person Be?
I was approached but I didn't want to do a movie because I don't think that narrative is the most important thing about a book. I didn't want people to see this or that actress as Sheila when they're reading the book. I said no for the book's sake.
Has success changed your life?
A lot of things came together in improbable ways that felt fortuitous beyond my designs, and seemed to push the book forward. My life is settled back to where I was before I got divorced. It's not that I'm with the same man – but I'm with a man. I've known him most of my life. There's a line from a dream I once had: "If you want to know what your life is, throw everything over and see what stays the same." Maybe there are certain magnetic things in your character that keep you in a certain place. The preoccupation that made me write the book has gone for me, it's been solved.
- How Should a Person Be?
- by Sheila Heti
-
How Should a Person Be? is structured like a literary version of reality TV. The narrator, Sheila, is a playwright, recently divorced, who is suffering from writer's block. In real life Heti had just divorced her husband of three years, and was trying to write a play for a feminist theatre company – which instead became How Should a Person Be?.
Set in Heti's native Toronto, the book is based on the author's own conversations with her artist friends (the character Margaux is Heti's real friend, painter Margaux Williamson), her analyst and her relationship with Israel, the man with whom she has intense, brutal sex.
But, in the spirit of the 19th-century bildungsroman, the book also asks questions such as: What does it mean to be an artist? What is ugly and what is beautiful? And how do we live a moral life?
Heti studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada before attending the University of Toronto to study art history and philosophy. Her short-story collection, The Middle Stories, appeared in 2001, then came Ticknor, a historical novel about a 19th-century biographer.
She collaborated with Misha Glouberman on a book of "conversational philosophy", The Chairs Are Where the People Go, which the New Yorker chose as one of its best books of 2011.
Heti looked set for a distinguished career as a writer of "difficult" literary fiction. But How Should a Person Be? was a surprise change of direction, as she plundered her own life. Writing fiction alone in a room, she felt isolated from the world and began taping conversations with friends, and bringing them to life. "It seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story," she told an interviewer in 2007.
Many editors turned the manuscript down – it didn't receive a US release until two years after publication in Canada. But How Should a Person Be? has made her a literary sensation.
Written from 2005 – when Heti was 28 – through to 2012, the book explores the messiness, self-consciousness and doubts of young women who have been told the world offers them unprecedented opportunities, but find themselves working as unpaid interns, living in grimy bedsits and dating loser men.
There are strong links with Lena Dunham's brilliant TV series Girls (Dunham has called Heti one of her favourite writers). Both their heroines have a masochistic sexual relationship that causes pain, but also self-revelation.
Like Dunham, Heti faces criticism for being part of a privileged (white) North American elite; but her writing asks important questions about roles for young women in late-capitalist society, and celebrates the power of female friendship.
In How Should a Person Be? you interview your friends, reproduce their emails. But you call it a work of art, not your journal?
Part of writing this book was "Can I write a book where I'm not the sole author?" Or rather, I am the sole author, but my vision is influenced by what I encounter in the world, and what I learn from other people. The creative process was far more public – I showed it to Margaux and many of my friends, all the way along. I was thinking of open source software and writing a book that had more of that "open source ethos" rather than, say, Microsoft where even the people who understand computers can't break into it because it's so closed. There's an essay on the internet that I was inspired by early on called "The Cathedral and the Bazaar". I didn't want to make a cathedral, I wanted the book to be a bazaar.
So it's more colloquial?
Your impulse as a writer is to make the sentences as beautiful as possible, but that wouldn't have made any sense at all for this book. It is like a performance or a monologue; Sheila's talking to you. It has to feel like spoken language. Some people might think I don't know how to write. [Laughs heartily.] But it's just silly that this kind of language should be put beneath literary language. I spent a lot of time capturing the sloppiness of the way people actually talk.
Did you worry about hurting real people by putting them in a book?
I'd never write a book in this way again. I understand why people write fiction now. A lot of complications can arise. Fiction is a way for writers to preserve their friendships and their romances!
For an autobiographical novel, there's very little about your parents. Can you tell us more?
My dad came to Canada in 1956 from Hungary as a boy, and my mother came in the 1970s when she married my dad. They're both Jews, and my Jewish heritage comes into the book. I don't know how much you know about Hungary, but they were so horrible during the second world war. It's still a very, very antisemitic country, so you tend to feel closer to the Jewish part than the Hungarian part, or you'd be in so much conflict.
Growing up you say you always felt "really afraid" of culture - adding, "I think it's being a child of immigrants".
I wasn't allowed to watch music videos as a kid. It was just that kind of environment. And I felt overwhelmed by pop culture. It was too loud and too much. Before this book I could never have imagined setting a book in the present. I don't really know any more about pop music than I did 10 years ago. I live in a silent world except for conversations and certain podcasts.
And yet the TV series The Hills inspired some of the dialogue for How Should a Person Be?…
I transcribed a few episodes and I was like, "Oh, these characters are talking the way people really talk." It was like Beckett, so open and mysterious. In the first season they didn't talk about anything – there was no subject to their conversation, it was just words, just their relationships.
Are you religious?
One of the first things I started reading when I was working on the book – not that I was quite sure it was a book – was the Bible. I was reading the Old and New Testament and turning emails from friends into text in the manner of biblical passages. I had the idea that Sheila and her friends are wandering in the desert, because this is the generation that doesn't reach the promised land. That's why there's no answer in the end. "How should a person be?" is the question Moses answers for the Jews with the 10 commandments. If Sheila could give the answer, she'd be like Moses. But she has to accept she's not. I'm not a religious person but I do think the biblical stories, like all great stories, continue to resonate in our lives.
Sheila's friendship with Margaux is very important in the book, yet she confesses she had no friends before the age of 25. Was it the same for you? Did you have to learn the art of friendship?
Yes, and I have found it to be a more beautiful art than the art of relationships, because there is enough of a distance. I find that when I'm in a relationship, I'm just so "in it", you couldn't even call it an art, it's such embroilment. With a friendship you can choose a little bit more how to behave. You can be guided more.
Can you tell me about the photo of you and Margaux, recreating Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe, with your friends Ryan and Sholem?
That was really fun. For all my fear of paintings, I love Manet. When he showed his work at the Paris salon, he was criticised for being so sloppy and his work being so ugly – but look at it now, and you think: "What were they talking about?" The way things have changed is because of him, it looks beautiful to us now. I only have one bathing suit so I had to wear that in the photo. For some reason I had to be the girl. I don't think Margaux would have wanted to be it.
The sex scenes are very powerful. Even though Sheila is in a submissive relationship with Israel, there's a muscularity to your writing.
I love Henry Miller and reading people who write well about sex. I love dirty books! I think there's a way of talking about the human that can be quite profound. I tried Fifty Shades of Grey but three pages in I realised I just couldn't read it. It was like every sentence was written by a different writer.
Sheila gradually realises she's in a destructive relationship…
She eventually gets out of it but I wanted to show her lose control; it's also part of her fantasy of wanting other people to tell her how to be – she thinks Israel is going to be this promised land and it turns out to be a place of real destruction and pain.
You say women have more freedom than ever before and yet at the same time we're in a climate that's more degrading to women.
Yes, just in terms of internet porn and stuff like that – that backlash against our freedom. Look at the way these women like Lindsay Lohan are experiencing public shaming. For what? You could say for being brats, but men are brats, too. These women are being made examples of. And I'm not even sure what everyone thinks they've done wrong.
Sheila talks about feeling androgynous at times. Is there a third sex?
I think there are 17 sexes! I even think having children versus not having children is a different sexuality. Having the inclination to be a parent, or not having the inclination, goes that deep. A friend had a baby recently and she said to me: "I feel something is coming over me and I'm not going to be able tell you the truth about my experience."
In the book you debate the nature of female genius - presumably because we haven't enough famous examples yet?
Yes, we've just had a exhibition in Toronto about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. And these banners outside the museum said: "He painted for the people; she painted to survive." The implication is he painted the story of his country and she painted her life. You think: "Come on, that's so insulting. She was painting the story of people, too, not just herself."
How do you answer criticism that you write from a position of privilege?
I think we have a lot to feel guilty for; the world is a horrible place for most people. Obviously there's inequity, I think any of us could do better at helping to resolve that in our lives… But art is not social justice. Art is art… Look at Lena [Dunham]. She's just supposed to make the TV show she wants to make. She doesn't have to solve the racial problem in America. Why is the problem between black and white in America laid on Lena Dunham's shoulders? No one made that complaint about Bored to Death, another HBO show about a group of white guys with a writer at the helm. It's so wrong. If people want to complain that HBO doesn't have enough shows directed by black women, I would agree. But let's not put that on Lena.
Will there be a film of How Should a Person Be?
I was approached but I didn't want to do a movie because I don't think that narrative is the most important thing about a book. I didn't want people to see this or that actress as Sheila when they're reading the book. I said no for the book's sake.
Has success changed your life?
A lot of things came together in improbable ways that felt fortuitous beyond my designs, and seemed to push the book forward. My life is settled back to where I was before I got divorced. It's not that I'm with the same man – but I'm with a man. I've known him most of my life. There's a line from a dream I once had: "If you want to know what your life is, throw everything over and see what stays the same." Maybe there are certain magnetic things in your character that keep you in a certain place. The preoccupation that made me write the book has gone for me, it's been solved.
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