Oh man. I feel like I'm on a roll: First "How To Be a Woman", then "Gone Girl", and now "How Should a Person Be?" From the titles of the books alone, you might surmise I'm having a bit of an existential crisis.
But, in any event, I just finished the last: Sheila Heti's "How Should A Person Be?" Despite the accolades, I couldn't get into it. Mostly, I found its the characters irritating. (The book has been widely compared to Lena Dunham's Girls, which means that I should probably skip that too.)
Still, there were some great passages:
- Two painters, discussing what it means to have freedom to paint: "Sholem was saying that freedom, for him, is having the technical facility to be able to execute whatever he wants, just whatever image he has in his mind. But that's not freedom! That's control, or power. Whereas I think that Margaux understands freedom to be the freedom to take risks, the freedom to do something bad or to appear foolish. Not to recognize that difference is a pretty big thing."
- "You remember the peur aeternus -- the eternal child -- Peter Pan -- the boy who never grows up, who never becomes a man?... Such people will suddenly tell you they have another plan, and they always do it the moment things start getting difficult. But it's their everlasting switchings that's the dangerous thing, not what they choose... [W]hile others actually build a life in which things gain in meaning and significance, this is not true of the peur. Such a person inevitably looks back on life as it nears its end with a feeling of emptiness and sadness, aware of what they have built: nothing. In their quest for a life without failure, suffering, or doubt, that is what they achieve: a life empty of all those things that make a human life meaningful."
- "What is American cheese anyway?" I heard one of them say. Her friend replied, "I think it means it has a chemical in it."
