A Life Worth Living

How to describe this utterly sui generis work? One might be more faithful to its accomplishment by describing what it is not. Which is: not quite novel, not quite diary, not quite memoir—though it has elements of all three. It is perhaps closest to a gathering of modern-day pensées or sketches, which, taken together, give us a full psychological portrait of the artist.

But it has been marketed as a novel, and so must be read as such. As with all of Heti’s work, How Should a Person Be? takes on its own beautifully idiosyncratic logic. Heti’s debut book, The Middle Stories, was a clever and sharply executed collection of short parables and fables; her novel Ticknor followed the neurotic musings of biographer George Ticknor in an astonishing act of ventriloquism.

How Should a Person Be? continues this tradition of resisting classification. An examination by the writer Sheila Heti of a character named Sheila Heti, the novel...