Sheila Heti’s “poppish, ‘pseudo-autobiographical’ anti-novel”1 How Should a Person Be? has been called “a zeitgeist barometer.”2 Marketed as a “novel from life,” the book is a generic mash-up that draws variously from the novel, the confessional memoir, the philosophical dialogue, and verbatim theatre, juxtaposing fiction with transcriptions of real conversations and emails. The book is often compared to Lena Dunham’s popular television show Girls on account of its young female protagonists and unflinching take on social and sexual taboos. Heti and Dunham are widely cited as the vanguard of the twenty-first-century “girl culture” movement.3 Both writers have also incurred backlash for their liberal use of autobiographical material as well as for their representations of morally and politically ambivalent women. This chapter focuses on both the content and the reception of Heti’s book How Should a Person Be?: while some reviewers see it as an avant-garde exploration of female subjectivity, others maintain that its experimental form belies its vacuous self-absorption. Against this charge, I argue that the novel’s formally encoded social critique emblematizes the concerns of “post-avant” identity writing.4 How Should a Person Be?’s third-wave feminist oscillation “between criticism and the pleasures of consumption”5 is inscribed in Heti’s engagement with what Irene Gammel has called the “female discursive practice” of confession:6 by simultaneously inhabiting and subverting the conventions of the confessional mode, Heti questions the norms surrounding gender and genre, and compels us to interrogate the connection between them.
The stakes of Heti’s experimental practice have become clear in the heated debate surrounding the novel; it began before the book had a publisher, when a number of influential critics blamed its universal rejection on sexism. Pursuant to its eventual publication, first in Canada in 2010 and subsequently in the United States and Britain in 2012,7 the conversation continued along similar lines, with several writers, including the author herself, accusing reviewers of gender discrimination. How Should a Person Be? is indeed a zeitgeist barometer insofar as it has allowed us to measure the cultural climate: the backlash against Heti’s novel occurs in the context of larger debates currently under way regarding sexism in the literary establishment. Whereas experimental, autobiographically inflected books by male writers such as Dave Eggers, Ben Lerner, and Karl Ove Knausgård have received wide acclaim, the negative reaction to Heti’s novel has raised questions regarding the gendering of the avant-garde, specifically within the domain of confessional writing. That the controversy surrounding How Should a Person Be? has foregrounded the very identity politics thematized in the text confirms the incisiveness of Heti’s critique.
This discussion is particularly timely given the number of recently published articles announcing the rise of the “girly” narrative.8 According to novelist Kate Zambreno, the term describes a young, female-driven narrative, featuring characters who are “not … entirely empowered, … who are ambivalent,” and “whose feminism is messy.”9 How Should a Person Be? is one of the most frequently cited members of this genre, other examples of which include the television show Girls, the singers Lana del Rey and Fiona Apple, and the actress Zooey Deschanel. This celebration of “girliness” is the extension of the 1990s “girl power” movement, popularized in magazines such as Bitch, BUST, and HUES, and by female musicians like the Riot Grrrls, Queen Latifah, and Courtney Love.10 Although some critics such as Germaine Greer have associated girl power with a depoliticized postfeminist position (best expressed, perhaps, in the Spice Girls’ “vapid championing of the slogan” for commercial gain), others, such as Rebecca Munford, have rightly defended girl culture as “a far more eclectic and politically grounded phenomenon.”11 Munford situates girl culture within a third-wave feminist rethinking of “the traditionally fraught relationship between feminism and popular culture,”12 arguing for its engagement in women’s ongoing struggle for self-definition.
How Should a Person Be? shares the concerns of third-wave feminism insofar as it “contains elements of second wave critique of beauty culture, sexual abuse, and power structures while it also acknowledges and makes use of the pleasure, danger, and defining power of those structures.”13 The novel oscillates between the veneration of beauty and its unmasking, blurs the line between sexual submission and humiliation, and tempers its attack on chauvinism with a deep suspicion regarding the possibility of female friendship. Heti has stated in interviews14 that the character Sheila, on the one hand a writer and intellectual, is incongruously modelled on celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan, an inheritance that is detectable in her twinned obsessions with beauty and recognition.15 Pondering the novel’s titular question in its opening pages, Sheila “can’t help answering like this: a celebrity.”16 This answer encourages her down a dead-end path of extreme aestheticization, in which she tries “to make the play I was writing—and my life, and my self—into an object of beauty. It was exhausting and all that I knew.”17 She goes so far as to get a job in a salon, where, she recounts, “I dressed up nicely every day and made sure to move elegantly while I was there, wanting to express in every pore of my being the beauty that people came to a salon to experience.”18 While the novel details this aesthetic striving, it also consistently makes fun of it, often by way of a massive ironic gap between Sheila’s vacuous pronouncements and the implied commentary of the author. In one instance, Sheila egregiously remarks to a horrified Margaux, her best friend, that she is “so happy with how we were making everyone jealous with how happy we were in the pool!”19 The effect of mise-en-abîme is heightened by the occurrence of this statement within one of the putatively verbatim sections of the novel (Heti makes reference to the tape recorder shutting off at this chapter’s conclusion). Not only do we watch Sheila watching others watch her, the metatextual conceit installs yet another layer of observation: we watch Heti watch Sheila watching others watch her.
That this “repetition with difference”20 is the stuff of parody has not prevented some critics from accusing the novel, and at times the author herself, of shallowness. “The fact that Heti is aware of and ironizing these qualities does not actually make them any less repellent,” wrote Katie Roiphe in Slate; another reviewer states that “it’s tricky to avoid exasperating readers when your narrator’s big art project is herself.”21 Roiphe’s elision of narrator and character is all too familiar when it comes to discussions of women’s writing: Irene Gammel speaks of women’s “subjection to confessional readings,” noting the ways in which readers and critics impose autobiographical interpretations that are in many cases actively resisted by the text.22 Both statements moreover confirm the validity of the assertion, reiterated recently by numerous critics and writers, that, when women “dare to dive into the messy and the mundane, they’re taken to task for creative solipsism.”23 I contend that Heti’s “big art project” is not just to record the self-congratulatory conversations of “a bunch of more or less privileged North American artists, at leisure to examine their creative ambitions and anxieties.”24 Lurking beneath what Heti describes as the “delicious, seemingly easy, bubbly surface”25 is a timely and trenchant critique of a culture that furnishes countless more examples of female celebrity than artists.
Heti’s primary target is the influence of gender roles on women’s lives and art. Although the novel’s title is gender-neutral, a more accurate description of its purview is expressed in the protagonist’s question, “What was a woman for?”26 The difficulty of answering this kind of question stems from the fact that “we haven’t too many examples yet of what being a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be.”27 This lack of definition motivates Sheila’s quest to articulate her identity in a world rife with “men who want to teach her something.”28 Sheila’s intuition that the closely linked questions of “how should a person be?” and “what was a woman for?” recall Virginia Woolf’s similar insight in “Professions for Women,” where Woolf ponders a related query: “What is a woman?”29 Woolf subsequently rejects the essentializing premise of the question, opining instead, “I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill.”30 In order for women to achieve this goal of self-expression, Woolf argues, they have to challenge prevailing stereotypes of how women should “be”: in her own practice, she tells us, this involved “killing the Angel in the House,” the Victorian trope of the chaste and self-effacing domestic goddess.31 Both Heti and her character Sheila will follow a similar trajectory by challenging the ideal models for feminine identity inherited from previous generations, including second-wave feminists.
Like Woolf, a pioneering modernist, Heti inscribes her ideological challenge most fully at the level of form. The formal experimentalism of How Should a Person Be? can be traced to the same vertiginous freedom that propels Sheila’s search for identity: in the absence of prescribed trajectories, the female artist must chart her own path. The Globe and Mail’s James Barber made this correlation explicit when he titled his review “How Should a Novel Be? Don’t Ask Sheila Heti,” replacing the existential question with an aesthetic one and emphasizing Heti’s ex-centric status with regard to the Canadian literary establishment. This positioning recalls Susan Suleiman’s argument concerning the zone of contact between feminism and the avant-garde, which Suleiman says is a shared affinity for the trope of the “margin.” A chief difference in usage is that whereas avant-garde artists have willingly chosen to inhabit this position, “the better to launch attacks at the centre,” women have been “relegated” to a space that is peripheral to the sphere of meaningful participation in society.32 Sheila’s comment about the lack of female geniuses is emblematic of the latter view. However, because the avant-garde places a positive value on ex-centricity, it can thereby furnish a platform for women’s agential self-definition:
In a system in which the marginal, the avant-garde, the subversive, all that disturbs and “undoes the whole” is endowed with positive value, a woman artist who can identify those concepts with her own practice and metaphorically with her own femininity can find in them a source of strength and self-legitimation.33
Both Heti and her quasi-fictional avatar make use of experimental tactics to claim a voice for themselves from their marginal positions. The metatextual blurring of the line between author and character is itself illustrative in this regard: Sheila strongly intimates that she wrote How Should a Person Be? instead of finishing the play “about women,” commissioned by a “feminist theatre company.”34 Sheila’s creation of a generically and thematically transgressive document instead of a more straightforward piece of theatre embodies the novel’s spirit of radical self-definition. Moreover, the suggestion that Sheila wrote the novel in which she figures as a character collapses the space between diegetic registers, encoding this iconoclasm at the level of form.
Heti’s twenty-first-century experimental practice must be distinguished from that of the historical avant-garde, whose aim was “to provoke an experience of the consciousness of a future, potential social order within an audience of the present.”35 Gregory Betts joins Suleiman in emphasizing that, while many contemporary writers display aesthetic continuities with twentieth-century avant-gardes (Dadaism, Surrealism, Cubism, Futurism, and so on), they differ in their ideological foundation.36 The “sociopolitical revolutionary mandate” that inspired an earlier generation of artists has in recent years been criticized for its (patriarchal) violence,37 or else deemed irrelevant to contemporary consumerist culture;38 for Betts, the “monolithic domination of capitalist ideology” forecloses the possibility of “any unified challenge or spirit of contestation.”39 Nevertheless, Betts argues that the “post-avant,” by virtue of its ideological multiplicity, has a role to play in “facilitating diverse challenges to particular sites of oppression.”40 He distinguishes the “multiplicity and polyvocalism” of contemporary literary communities and discourses from the “militaristic alignment of previous gardes.”41 Some of the most vital examples hail from the framework of identity writing, a broad category whose leading practitioners include women, queer writers, and writers of colour.42
How Should a Person Be? exemplifies contemporary identity writing insofar as it combines “the aesthetics of identity with formal experimentation to create a writing of unalienated subjectivities that embodies the new or proposed subjectivity in the formal characteristics of the work.”43 In his New Yorker review, James Wood situates How Should a Person Be? within “a contemporary literary movement that is impatient with conventional fiction-making,” citing Heti’s comments to that effect. Of equal, if not greater, significance, however, is the novel’s experimentation with the putatively non-fictional, “female discursive practice” of confessional writing.44 Heti’s use of metatextuality, in particular, makes it difficult to determine exactly whether she is violating the autobiographical pact or the fourth wall.45 Whereas “[t]he ‘confessional’ and the ‘metafictional’ figure almost as opposites,”46 Heti idiosyncratically fuses these modes; in doing so, she joins other feminist critics and practitioners in challenging the misperception that women are “effusively confessional creatures in a way that men are not.”47 In recent decades, feminist scholars have been working to correct this essentialism by drawing attention to the material circumstances linking genre to gender. They correlate the nonlinear and episodic nature of the diaries, journals, and notebooks that proliferated in the eighteenth century, relating them to the correspondingly “fragmented, interrupted, and formless nature of [women’s] lives” in male-dominated society.48 In the contemporary context, critics have emphasized the effect of the literary marketplace in determining generic norms: Elisabeth Donnelly describes the “double-edged sword” faced by (particularly young) women, who are encouraged to “write about their young and modern lives, particularly when there is the whiff of sex or scandal,” and then are accused of self-involvement when they do so. This insight is the starting point for scholarship focused on the techniques that female confessional writers have used to “creatively dodge and escape confessional snares.”49 Heti’s avant-garde fusion of autobiography and fiction is consistent with what Gammel has called the “strategies of evasion, displacement and obfuscation” through which contemporary writers react against the gendered expectations that attend the confessional mode.50
Heti however departs in significant ways from the second-wave “feminist confession” described by Rita Felski, even as she adopts some of its tactics. According to Felski, this genre emerged in the late twentieth century as women realized the potential of confession to function as political discourse.51 Felski defines the feminist confession in terms of its dual mandate to relay an individual woman’s life while simultaneously selecting the “representative aspects of experience” for a collectivity of women.52 This twinned objective, she argues, “mitigates” the referential demands of the autobiographical pact, licensing the use of fiction to enable the telling of larger social truths.53 Although Heti also makes use of fiction, she does so for different reasons. The feminist confession is “less concerned with unique individuality or notions of essential humanity than with delineating the specific problems and experiences which bind women together”;54 Heti’s “hideously narcissistic” novel,55 by contrast, is heavily inflected by the conventions of the Künstlerroman, with its emphasis on the artist’s individual process of maturation. Sheila’s focus on celebrity, genius, and making her life “beautiful” is reminiscent of the very “bourgeois individualism” that the feminist confession ostensibly reacts against.56 This individualist impulse is encoded in the novel’s formal experimentation: rather than “deemphasize the aesthetic and fictive dimension of the text”57 for the sake of readerly identification, How Should a Person Be? announces itself as primarily fictional, albeit a fiction “from life.” Although the novel incorporates transcripts of conversations and emails, these putatively “real” documents are heavily stylized (for example, by being presented in the form of enumerated lists) and incorporated into a fictional frame. The blurbs on the dust jacket play up the novel’s “originality,” heralding “[a] new kind of book and a new kind of person.” That this individualist impulse is nevertheless mobilized for the sake of gender critique is consistent with the third-wave tendency “to focus on individual narratives and to think of feminism as a form of individual empowerment.”58 Thus, while How Should a Person Be? is clearly operating within a tradition of feminist, confessional reimagining, its formal innovation corresponds to an ideological shift consistent with its third-wave politics.
This third-wave sensibility informs the novel’s treatment of sex, which is historically the privileged topic of women’s confessional writing. The narrative of sexual transgression is in fact so commonplace that multiple critics have cautioned that telling sexual stories will merely “entrap” women in received modes of thinking and writing.59 Even the feminist confession, which ostensibly reacts against proscriptive sexual identities, “can at times reproduce images of women uncomfortably close to the stereotypes feminist theorists are attempting to challenge.”60 Heti however avoids rehearsing the timeworn narrative of sexual transgression by incorporating her descriptions of sex into an overarching commentary on gender politics. That Sheila’s pursuit of sexual relationships by turns empowers her and degrades her forestalls the reification of sex, forcing the reader to encounter it as the shifting site on which identity politics are played out. Although Sheila dubs her era “the age of some really great blow-job artists” (which she humourously contrasts with the nineteenth-century mastery of the novel),61 she often discusses sex using the language of abjection. Her appeal to the abject connects her to earlier avant-garde manifestations such as the famous slicing of the eyeball in the surrealist film Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador DalÍ, Antonin Artaud’s appeal to scatology in his essay “Shit to the Spirit,” and John Waters’s exploitation film Pink Flamingos. In How Should a Person Be?, the sexually abject manifests itself when Sheila mentions vomiting during fellatio62 or making out with a wart-riddled man who covers her in “acrid saliva.”63 Regarding the latter, Sheila states: “This is the great privilege of being a woman—we get to decide.”64 Her rhetoric is straight out of the second-wave feminist handbook, whose insistence that “the personal is political” enshrines the value of self-determination. Sheila, however, violates the feminist script by using her hard-won choice to engage in self-effacing acts. To recontextualize Leah Guenther’s insight: “instead of confessing transgressions of sex, [Sheila] confesses her sins of gender.”65 Another example is her ill-fated decision to get married because “commitment looked so beautiful to me.”66 Sheila’s “messy feminism” involves exercising her choice to make decisions that she knows are ultimately disempowering. As readers, we are called upon simultaneously to endorse and to question her agency, and thereby to participate in the third-wave dialectic of celebration and critique.
Although Sheila repeatedly extolls the virtues of male companionship,67 she is also deeply scornful of men, who are consistently represented as adversaries to be either repelled (“The last thing I wanted was to be with a man, but it could not be avoided for long, sitting at a bar as I was”),68 humoured (“I just do what I can not to gag too much”),69 or begrudgingly embraced (see above). This gender antagonism is however provocatively sublated into sexual role-play in Sheila’s passionate liaison with the charismatic artist Israel (“a genius, but not a genius at painting …, a genius at fucking”).70 Beyond its explicit language, what makes the “Interlude for Fucking” particularly transgressive is the way that Israel’s acts of extreme sexual domination and Sheila’s corresponding desire to be dominated channel a gendered power imbalance. In a representative passage, Sheila rhetorically apostrophizes her lover:
All right, Israel, cum in my mouth. Don’t let me wash it out, so that when I talk to those people, I can have your cum swimming in my mouth, and I will smile at them and taste you. It will be as you wanted it, me standing there, tasting your cum, stumbling over my words. And if you see something you don’t like, you can correct me later. You can take your hands and bruise my neck, keep pushing till you feel the soft flesh at the back of my throat, so the tears roll down my cheeks like they do every time you thrust your cock to the very back of my throat—like it never was with any other man.71
The iconography of tears and bruises evokes the language of sexual violence, recalling the third-wave imaginary, as characterized by Heywood and Drake. Although Sheila plumbs the depths of inequality, rhetorically exhorting Israel to lend her out to his friends and treat her like “a sow you lead around the house with a leash,”72 this language is recuperated into a project of radical sexual freedom. Once more, Sheila’s rhetoric recalls that of Antonin Artaud (“Shit to the Spirit”) or Georges Bataille (“The Solar Anus”), both of whom mobilized the language of abjection to critique the received views of Western metaphysics. Here, Sheila’s strategic self-abasement anticipates and forecloses the gaze of the male artist (i.e., Israel): if “‘imagination’ gendered female is a figure on whom the male artist makes proprietary claims,”73 Sheila rejects the role of benevolent muse. She instead crafts a fantasy of her own devising, in which her subordinate position becomes the imaginative fodder for her ecstatic self-fulfillment. Sheila’s use of violent imagery in the context of a consensual sexual relationship bears out the claim that within contemporary feminism, “codes for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as well as gender ideals are no longer polarized.”74 By contrast with the second-wave emphasis on collective identification, Heywood and Drake suggest, third-wave feminism relativizes its terms of judgment, rendering them subjective to the individual.75 To this extent, Sheila’s acts of extreme submission can also be seen as acts of self-empowerment.
This conclusion is, however, complicated when the fantasy slips over into an all too real humiliation: having obeyed Israel’s directive to write him a letter extolling the virtues of his penis while exposing herself to a stranger, Sheila looks up midsentence to find “a chubby young boy … [laughing] up at me openly to see my whole cunt.”76 Sheila flees the scene in shame, “head bent low, heart thumping, looking only at the street.”77 This episode dispels the sexual excitement of Israel’s commands, leaving only a residue of degradation; if the abject was previously an empowering challenge to social propriety, here, it becomes associated with a disempowering humiliation. Sheila will later take her revenge by humiliating Israel in turn, denying him his position of sexual mastery through an act of symbolic emasculation:
We lay silently in my bed, and then my body felt it, deep and calm: what I wanted to do—something I had never done before. Without letting myself think about it a moment more, I shuffled down beneath the covers, saying to him as I did it, ‘I want to sleep beside your cock’. I slithered down there and lay, my lips soft up against his dick. I felt his legs grow tense. ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘No’ .… I felt so alert as I felt his dick shrink away, disgusted or ashamed.…
I had gone down, gone under, and when several minutes later I surfaced from beneath the hot, stuffy sheets, it felt truly like I was emerging into a new world entirely. Israel kept his back turned. We did not speak the rest of the night.78
Sheila exorcises her own degradation by placing Israel in the subordinate role, experiencing a kind of rebirth in the process. This role reversal unmasks the unidirectional flow of power in their relationship: her submissive position, it turns out, is more than just a sexual contrivance. This revelation complicates our earlier endorsement of her willed passivity, which we now cannot help but incorporate into a larger social narrative of male domination. There is however no coherent feminist standpoint from which to evaluate a relationship in which a power imbalance is by turns erotic and degrading. Heti’s complex descriptions of sex prevent us from extrapolating any maxim for how a woman “should be,” sidestepping the false “Madonna/whore dichotomy”79 that either under- or overemphasizes sexuality as the means to women’s self-actualization.
In addition to her fraught relationships with men, Sheila’s deeply ambivalent relationships with other women constitute another violation of the second-wave, confessional script. One of her primary difficulties in fulfilling the feminist theatre company’s commission is that she admittedly “[doesn’t] know anything about women!”80 She moreover confesses that she has no idea how to be friends with another woman, and is in fact unsure that such a scenario is even practicable: she fears that “[a] woman can’t find or take up home in the heart of another woman—not permanently. It’s just not a safe place to land.”81 Sheila’s alienation from both women and the discourse of feminism signals her lack of identification with prescribed models for “how to be” and again distinguishes her project from the collectivism that typifies second-wave ideology. And yet, the defining relationship of the novel will be her friendship with the artist Margaux (who is based on the visual artist Margaux Williamson): in the words of one reviewer, “How Should a Person Be? is a Bildungsroman about two women trying to become artists.”82 If Sheila has spent her life avoiding relationships with women, Margaux, by contrast, has spent her life longing for a female counterpart: “I searched high and low and found you! All my life all I wanted was a girl!” she states.83 Margaux, however, does not want a friend to gossip with: a notable feature of their relationship is the near absence of conversations about men.84 In part, Sheila tells us, this can be attributed to the fact that Margaux “was made impatient by conversations about relationships or men,” a reality reflected in the dialogue recorded in the novel.85 More importantly, however, it is because Sheila and Margaux simply have other things to discuss. Early on, Sheila defines her relationship with Margaux as one of artistic collaboration: “Margaux complements me in interesting ways,” she tells us. “She paints my picture, and I record what she is saying. We do whatever we can to make the other one feel famous.”86 Their intellectual kinship is distilled in exchanges on topics such as which artists are “funny” (Harmony Korine and Werner Herzog are funny. Richard Serra is not funny).87 Sheila’s ultimate decision to divorce her husband and instead to seek fulfillment in her creative collaboration with Margaux deviates from the social script that privileges heterosexual marriage as a woman’s primary goal. While Sheila’s general attitude toward women borders on misogyny, her relationship with Margaux is an exemplary representation of female complexity. Sheila’s nuanced attitude toward both men and women challenges normative gender roles, communicating her individualistic understanding of identity.
It is, nevertheless, important to distinguish Sheila’s idiosyncratic self-definition from the “anarchic individualism” that characterizes the historical avant-garde.88 Although Sheila charts her own ideological path, she does so surrounded by a community of artist friends with whom she is in constant, overt, and implicit dialogue: as Menachem Feuer points out, “the people she could take guidance from are by and large on the same journey as she is.”89 Emphasizing the novel’s substantial Jewish content, Feuer declares Sheila a “female schlemiel, amongst a small community of schlemiel-artists.”90 Sheila’s imbrication in her artistic community can be likened to Heti’s own collaborative praxis: in a piece by Sholem Krishtalka (the “real” Sholem) entitled “You and Me and Her and Us and Them: A Conversation on Using and Being Used,” Krishtalka describes the “snarl of knotted relationships and processes,” all of which bind their Toronto-based artistic network.91 In that same article, Heti describes the process of fictionalizing her friends as “an expression of love.”92 This affective description of artistic praxis as a collective, processual undertaking must be distinguished from the model of romantic isolation associated with the historical avant-garde. Sheila registers her criticism of the “phoney-baloney genius crap” peddled by “Mark Z.” (Mark Z. Danielwski, author of the experimental novel House of Leaves) and “Christian B.” (experimental poet Christian Bök), whose commercial success belies their putative avant-gardism.93 Her critique, which finds its fullest expression in her description of the commodified, corporatized Art Basel, recalls Peter Bürger’s thesis that the avant-garde is inevitably doomed to be reappropriated as a bourgeois commodity.94 Having paid her $20 entrance fee and stood in line, Sheila is finally allowed to enter the “cold, cavernous, convention-centre air,” where her first observation is the juxtaposition of two phrases: “USB [a bank, the fair’s sponsor] welcomes you to Art Basel Miami Beach” and a quotation from Andy Warhol, “Everybody’s sense of beauty is different from everybody else’s.”95 The irony of Andy Warhol’s being yoked into the service of the very same consumerism thematized in his work is not lost on the two artists: Margaux’s gloss of the line from Warhol is, “It’s saying you can be rich and stupid about art. You’re all welcome.”96 Later, the pair run into an “old rich couple” who encapsulate this attitude; they have “so little wall space that whatever they bought in Miami would end up in rotation.”97 This couple’s relationship to art as a commodified form of social capital is completely antithetical to the transcendent, existential function that art serves for Sheila and her circle.
Feuer’s concept of the “schlemiel-artist” is useful in distinguishing the art of Sheila and her friends from that of Mark Z., Christian B., and the commodities owned by the rich couple. Although Margaux does in fact have work on display at Art Basel, when asked whether she’s sold anything, she says that she “doesn’t know,” “doesn’t think so,” or at any rate, “hasn’t asked.”98 This attitude is typical of Margaux, who is “embarrassed” when people praise her art because of her “shame about all the things wrong in the world that she wasn’t trying to fix”;99 for her, art is a mode of being that she is driven to pursue almost in spite of herself. Sheila, likewise, fails to produce a coherent and potentially remunerative piece of writing for the feminist theatre company, instead generating the “messy book”100 that the reader is implied to be holding in her hands. The novel’s closing image—a squash game meant to establish the winner of the Ugly Painting Competition, played by Margaux and Sholem, neither of whom knows the rules—embodies this same sense of creative production as extrinsic to any social or financial economy. Margaux’s partner Misha summarizes the novel’s aesthetic ideology when criticizing Sholem’s “fear of being bad”: “It’s good for an artist to try things. It’s good for an artist to be ridiculous.”101 The Ugly Painting Competition has proven that slavish adherence to rules can only produce the “textbook ugly”;102 Art Basel has revealed the ugliness of commodification. Just as Artaud proclaims “shit to the spirit” so as to restore the creative pre-eminence of “the body that it vampirized,”103 Sheila will ultimately declare “shit to the beautiful,” and also “shit to the ‘phoney-baloney genius’’’:
Now it was time to write. I went straight into my studio and I thought about everything I had, all the trash and the shit inside me. And I started throwing that trash and throwing that shit, and the castle started to emerge.… And I began to light up my soul with scenes.
I made what I could with what I had. And I finally became a real girl.104
This epiphany becomes the basis for the “post-avant” feminist praxis embodied in her eventual novel. In abandoning the quest for beauty and perfection, as well as the corresponding desire for social or commercial success, Sheila also frees herself from the “highly conventional metaphors and narratives of gender, views of women as static, immobile, eternal, goddess-like,” all of which ironically, pepper the discourse of the historical avant-garde.105 Like Woolf before her, it is only after killing the “angel in the house” that the “real girl” can appear.
By contrast with the formal and thematic experimentation of How Should a Person Be?, the critical discourse surrounding the novel has rehearsed “decades old claims that women writing about their private lives are narcissistic, solipsistic, vain.”106 Initially rejected by both Heti’s American publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux as well as by a number of other American and Canadian publishers, the book began to gain critical attention only when two excerpts were published in Mark Greif’s tastemaking, online literary magazine n+1, one of which was graphically sexual. In an interview with the New York Observer, Greif attributed the reticence to a “male-dominated culture of literature.”107 Art critic Dave Hickey is also quoted in that article as stating, “Jonathan Franzen can get away with things because he’s a boy. Getting a blow job is different from giving one.” With that “helpful prod from the avant garde” (notably comprised only of men), Heti was suddenly inundated with calls from interested publishers, including Henry Holt, an imprint of Macmillan, which ultimately published the novel in the United States.108 This trajectory rehearses two arguments repeatedly made by feminist critics: that women’s confessional writing is endorsed only when it is overtly sexual, and that, often, female voices are heard only once they have been “appropriated, tamed, and recolonized” under the name of a patriarchal “author/ity.”109
Some have accused the novel’s critics of the same literary sexism that almost impeded its publication, citing, for example, James Wood, the reviewer from the New Yorker, who, on the one hand, offers rhapsodic praise for Ben Lerner’s “subtle, sinuous, and very funny first novel,” Leaving the Atocha Station, but on the other hand offers a tepid assessment of How Should a Person Be?110 Although Wood opens the two reviews with the requisite references to the literary masters of yore (Dostoyevsky makes an appearance in both), Lerner’s protagonist is inducted into the lineage of “those frustrated Russian antiheroes” and is described as “a convincing representative of twenty-first-century American homo literatus,” while Heti’s novel is a “collection box for gathering the stray donations and aperçus and complaints of her generation.” Although Wood does at times recognize the merits of Heti’s book, he describes her prose as “what one might charitably call basic”; “If I wanted to hear that,” he writes of a particular passage, “I could settle in at Starbucks and wait for the schoolkids to get out at three o’clock.” Perhaps most notably, Wood neglects even to mention the pronounced autobiographical elements of Lerner’s novel111 while making much of them in Heti’s case—a difference that reveals the tendency to overemphasize the confessional elements of women’s writing while downplaying similar qualities in writing by men.
For critics such as Michelle Dean, Wood’s tonal discrepancy is indicative of a gender bias in literary reviewing: “influential, ‘serious’ men,” she argues, are put off by novels that “focus on the intellectual effects of female friendships.”112 Anna North agrees that “[s]tories by and about young women—about ‘girls’ and ‘girly’ concerns—are increasingly capturing our attention, and they may force a still male-dominated cultural establishment to reconsider what it considers ‘serious’.”113 Katie Roiphe has pointed out that the same avant-gardism endorsed in men’s confessional writing is perceived as self-indulgent or narcissistic when produced by a woman: “what in a male writer appears as courage or innovation or literary heroics would be read, in a woman, even by the liberal, enlightened, and literary, as hubris or worse.”114 She accordingly claims that a woman could never have written a work like Karl Ove Knausgård’s multi-volume, 3,500-page, autobiographical epic, Min Kamp [My Struggle]. Following Woolf’s trajectory, Roiphe makes her point by imagining the fate of Knausgård’s female alter-ego. In A Room of One’s Own, Woolf invents the character of Judith Shakespeare, sister to the Bard, tracing the inevitable demise of Judith at the hands of a sexist society blind to her abilities.115 In a similar thought experiment, Roiphe imagines a writer named “Carla Krauss” publishing a book like Knausgård’s, in which she details her daily struggles. Such a work, she concludes, would be universally dismissed as the author’s “nattering on about inanities,” because “[t]he particular variety of rage aimed at women who document their daily lives … is deeply entrenched and irrational. It’s not just that we don’t think of what they are doing as art, but that it annoys us, riles us. It feels presumptuous, vain, narrow, feminine, clichéd.”116 Roiphe makes two related claims: that confessional texts by men and women are evaluated according to different standards, and that the label of “avant-garde” is reserved for male writers. Ironically, two years before writing this article, Roiphe panned Heti’s novel; she accused it of “shallowness and self-consciousness all the way through,” thereby confirming her own subsequent insight regarding our impatience with such narratives.117
Heti has herself weighed in on the limitations faced by female writers; where Roiphe speaks about the mundane, Heti makes a similar point regarding women’s inability to delve into the universal:
[T]he most ancient of philosophical questions are questions of ethics and questions like “how should a person be?” [However, if] you put these concerns in the mouth of a contemporary North American woman who has sex, it’s called “navel-gazing,” even though it’s the exact same question humans have been asking forever.118
Arguments like these have gained particular traction in the wake of the backlash against the “girly” narratives currently proliferating within popular culture, many of which contain varying degrees of autobiographical content.119 In a recent piece for Salon, Stassa Edwards suggests that it is time to retire the word “overshare,” a popular invective directed at confessional writers (and the “2008 Word of the Year,” according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary). The problem with this label, argues Edwards, is that it is “weirdly gendered,” seemingly “designed to patrol the boundaries of female confessional writing; to level the accusation that a woman overshares is to indicate that she has crossed some invisible boundary of ‘acceptable’ material.”120 Edwards cites Heti among the writers thus accused. The issue is complicated by How Should a Person Be?’s avowedly fictional status. While the novel’s experimental form does as much to ward off autobiographical interpretation as it does to invite it, and although Heti has cited Kenneth Goldsmith, Richard Serra, and Søren Kierkegaard among her artistic influences,121 confessional readings persist. Rather than focus on the book’s challenge to generic norms, such readings reinscribe How Should a Person Be? within a pre-set female literary trajectory. Along the same lines, Chris Kraus presciently predicted that Heti’s novel would be compared to “fatuous blogs and social media” rather than to literary innovators like Don Quixote. That she was ultimately correct speaks to the limited conceptual rubrics applied to writing by young women.
In both its content and its critical reception, How Should a Person Be? makes us question the connection between gender and genre. My contention is that Heti’s simultaneous use and subversion of confessional discourse maintains the same tension “between criticism and the pleasures of consumption”—that typifies third-wave feminism. The insight that there “is no ideal model for how [her] mind should be”122—an insight that begins as a reflection on the lack of female role models—ultimately inspires Sheila’s quest for artistic self-definition. That it leads her into the territory of experimental art confirms Susan Suleiman’s characterization of the margin as a potentially generative space for female self-definition. By contrast, the negative reaction to her book reminds us of the ongoing challenges that women face in a male-dominated literary market.123 These challenges are particularly acute for female experimental writers, whose formal innovations are often ignored or disparaged. The reception of How Should a Person Be? is a cautionary tale for critics, the moral of which is that we must avoid reducing the “girly” narratives of Heti, Dunham, and their contemporaries, to a set of gendered stereotypes. Otherwise, like the military vanguard from which it draws its name, the avant-garde will continue to refer to a group of powerful men.
1 John Barber, “How Should a Novel Be? Don’t Ask Sheila Heti,” Globe and Mail (13 April 2013).
2 James Adams, “Margaux Williamson: Meet the Artist Whose Life Has Been the Stuff of Fiction,” Globe and Mail (24 May 2014).
3 Heti and Dunham are open admirers of each other’s work: see Heti’s effusive comments to Thessaly La Force in “Sheila Heti on How Should a Person Be?,” The Paris Review (18 June 2012), and Dunham’s choice of How Should a Person Be? as a favourite book in Entertainment Weekly, http://howshouldapersonbe.tumblr.com/post/25190872067/lena-dunham-chooses-how-should-a-person-be-as-a.
4 Gregory Betts, Avant-Garde Canadian Literature: The Early Manifestations (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 84.
5 Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, “‘It’s All about the Benjamins’: Economic Determinants of Third Wave Feminism in the United States,” Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 52.
6 Irene Gammel, “Introduction,” Confessional Politics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 1.
7 There are in fact two versions of How Should a Person Be? The American edition, published by Henry Holt/House of Anansi in 2012, varies slightly from the Canadian version published by Anansi in 2010. This essay uses the US edition. For a discussion of the differences between the two versions, see Anna Altman, “Two Versions, One Heti,” Paris Review (27 July 2012), http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2012/07/27/two-versions-one-heti/.
8 To name but a few, see Anna Holmes, “The Age of Girlfriends,” The New Yorker; Anna North, “The Rise of the Girly Narrative,” BuzzFeed; Alyssa Rosenberg, “Sheila Heti, Lena Dunham, and the Challenges of Telling ‘Girly’ Stories in Film and Television,” Slate; Susie Mesure, “The Rise of the Woman-child,” The Independent; and Sady Doyle, “Vulnerability: The New Girl Power,” In These Times.
9 North, “The Rise.”
10 Rebecca Munford, “‘Wake Up and Smell the Lipgloss’: Gender, Generation and the (A)politics of Girl Power,” Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 143.
11 Munford, “‘Wake Up,” 143.
12 Munford, 143–144.
13 Heywood and Drake, “It’s All About,” 3. The term “third wave” was initially coined in the mid-1980s by a group of feminist academics and activists who collaborated on the (never-published) volume The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism. It was subsequently developed in anthologies such as Rebecca Walker’s Changing the Face of Feminism (1995) and Barbara Findlen’s Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation (1995) (Orr 30). It must be noted, as Catherine Orr has, that “the term is hard to pin down”: third-wave feminism encompasses a wide variety of perspectives, many of which are at odds with each other (29). This essay draws mainly on the account by Heywood and Drake; for a useful discussion of the internal contradictions within third-wave feminism. See Catherine Orr, “Charting the Currents of the Third Wave,” Hypatia 3.12 (Summer 1997): 29–45. See Stacy Gillis, Gillian Howie, and Rebecca Munford, eds., Third Wave Feminism: A Critical Exploration (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). And see Jennifer Scanlon, “Sexy from the Start: Anticipatory Elements of Second Wave Feminism,” Women’s Studies 38 (2009): 127–150.
14 See Heti’s interview with Thessaly La Force in The Paris Review.
15 Sheila Heti, How Should a Person Be? (Toronto: House of Anansi, 2012), 13.
16 Heti, How, 2.
17 Heti, 13.
18 Heti, 53.
19 Heti, 112.
20 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 32.
21 Becky Ohlsen, “‘How Should a Person Be? Review: Young Woman’s Navel-gazing Frustrates but Makes You Think,” The Oregonian (23 June 2012), http://www.oregonlive.com/books/index.ssf/2012/06/how_should_a_person_be_review.html.
22 Gammel, “Introduction,” 3. Along the same lines, Robert McGill uses the phrase “biographical desire” to describe “the desire to treat a literary text as a way of coming to know its author” (67). His discussion of the confessional readings that have accompanied Elizabeth Smart’s quasi-autobiographical By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept is highly germane to the present topic. See Robert McGill, “A Necessary Collaboration: Biographical Desire and Elizabeth Smart,” English Studies in Canada 33.3 (September 2007): 67–88.
23 Elizabeth Donnelly, “Why Does Women’s Confessional Writing Get People So Riled Up?” Flavorwire (8 July 2014). See also Alyssa Rosenberg, “Sheila Heti, Lena Dunham, and the Challenges of Telling ‘Girly’ Stories in Film and Television,” Slate (9 July 2012); Laurie Penny, “Laurie Penny on Lena Dunham’s Girls: It Can’t Represent Every Woman, but Shouldn’t Have To,” New Statesman (4 February 2014). As well, see Stassa Edwards, “Enough ‘Oversharing’: It’s Time to Retire One of the Media’s Favorite Words,” Salon (17 July 2014).
24 James Wood, “True Lives,” The New Yorker (25 June 2012).
25 Quoted in Barber, “How Should.”
26 Heti, How, 31–32.
27 Heti, 3.
28 Heti, 224.
29 Virginia Woolf, “Professions for Women,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., Vol. B (New York: Norton, 2001), 2477.
30 Woolf, “Professions,” 2477.
31 Woolf, 2477.
32 Susan Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 14.
33 Suleiman, Subversive Intent, 17.
34 Heti, How, 41.
35 Betts, Avant, 14–15.
36 Betts, 79.
37 See Suleiman, Subversive Intent.
38 Betts, Avant, 79–81. Betts lists Frank Davey, Pauline Butling, Susan Rudy, and Jeff Derksen.
39 Betts, 83.
40 Betts, 84.
41 Betts, 85.
42 Betts, 84.
43 Betts, 84.
44 Gammel, “Introduction,” 1.
45 Philippe Lejeune argues that a work labelled as autobiographical promises that the author, narrator, and protagonist will be identical, creating an “autobiographical pact” with its reader (12). See Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
46 Bran Nichol, “‘The Memoir as Self-Destruction’: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2009), 107.
47 Leah Guenther, “Bridget Jones’s Diary: Confessing Post-feminism,” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2009), 89.
48 Estelle C. Jelinek, “Introduction: Women’s Autobiography and the Male Tradition,” Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 19.
49 Gammel, “Introduction,” 2. These are considered in works such as Irene Gammel’s Confessional Politics, Leigh Gilmore’s Autobiographics, and Jo Gill’s Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays.
50 Jo Gill, “Introduction,” Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays (New York: Routledge, 2009), 7.
51 Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 87. Among Felski’s examples of this subgenre are Kate Millett’s Flying (1974), Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals (1980), and Ann Oakley’s Taking It Like a Woman (1984).
52 Felski, Beyond, 95.
53 Felski, 94.
54 Felski, 94.
55 Wood, “True Lives.”
56 Felski, Beyond, 94.
57 Felski, 101.
58 Heywood and Drake, “It’s All About,” 14.
59 Gammel, “Introduction,” 7–8.
60 Felski, Beyond, 119.
61 Sheila’s reflections on her era also bear out the insights of Heywood and Drake, both of whom note that women in the third wave “are as likely or more likely to identify with their generation as with their gender” (“It’s All About,” 14).
62 Heti, How, 4.
63 Heti, 40.
64 Heti, 40.
65 Guenther, “Bridget,” 93. Guenther was speaking about the character Bridget Jones, a clear foremother to the current crop of “messy feminists.”
66 Heti, 22.
67 Heti, 31, 41.
68 Heti, 231.
69 Heti, 3.
70 Heti, 197.
71 Heti, 120.
72 Heti, 126.
73 Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “Pater-Daughter: Male Modernists and Female Readers,” The Pink Guitar (New York: Routledge, 1990), 54.
74 Heywood and Drake, “It’s All About,” 16.
75 Heywood and Drake, 14.
76 Heti, How, 226.
77 Heti, 227.
78 Heti, 271–272.
79 Munford, “Wake Up,” 142.
80 Heti, How, 41.
81 Heti, 33.
82 Joanna Biggs, “It Could Be Me,” London Review of Books 35.2 (January 2013).
83 Heti, How, 247.
84 Several reviewers have pointed out that How Should a Person Be? is one of the rare works that passes the Bechdel Test, a simple feminist metric invented by the graphic novelist Allison Bechdel, who stipulates only that (a) two named characters (b) must talk to each other (c) about something other than a man (see, for example, Biggs; Stoeffel). Although this may seem like a minimal requirement, it is shocking how many works fail the test. This is particularly true of films: in a database of 5,615 movies, only 57 percent of them actually met all three requirements (http://bechdeltest.com/statistics/).
85 Heti, How, 198.
86 Heti, 3.
87 Heti, 99.
88 Betts, Avant, 83.
89 Menachem Feuer, “The Postmodern Chelm, or The Artistic Community in Sheila Heti’s ‘How Should a Person Be?’—Part I,” The Home of Schlemiel Theory (11 June 2014).
90 Menachem Feuer, “The Postmodern Chelm.” A schlemiel is a Yiddish-derived word denoting a “stupid, awkward, or unlucky person” (Oxford); in Feuer’s usage, the term refers to a person who is “somewhere between a man and a child” (“Personal Accounts”). The term is fitting, insofar as Sheila and her friends are flawed idealists whose grand ambitions are often beset by failure (see, for example, the “ugly painting contest,” which, although devised by Sholem, sets off “a train of really depressing and terrible thoughts” that ultimately “plunges him into despair” [14]). See also Menachem Feuer, “Personal Accounts of the Schlemiel (Take 1)—Schlemiel, the Son of Schlemiel,” The Home of Schlemiel Theory (18 February 2013).
91 Sholem Krishtalka, “Me and You and Her and Us and Them: A Conversation on Using and Being Used,” C Magazine 109 (2011): 6.
92 Sholem Krishtalka, “Me and You,” 13.
93 Heti, How, 4.
94 Bürger, Theory, 53.
95 Heti, How, 107.
96 Heti, 108.
97 Heti, 109.
98 Heti, 109.
99 Heti, 17.
100 Wood, “True Lives.”
101 Heti, How, 18.
102 Heti, 293.
103 Antonin Artaud, “Shit to the Spirit,” Antonin Artaud Anthology (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1965), 111.
104 Heti, How, 277.
105 DuPlessis, “Pater-Daughter,” 44.
106 Guenther, “Bridget,” 90.
107 Stoeffel, “The Problem.”
108 Barber, “How Should.”
109 Gammel, “Introduction,” 4.
110 Wood, “True Lives.” See, for example, Michelle Dean, “Listening to Women: Why Smart, Serious Men Have Misunderstood Sheila Heti’s New Book,” Slate Book Review (29 June 2012). See also Anna North, “The Rise of the ‘Girly’ Narrative,” BuzzFeed (5 July 2012).
111 As Heti summarizes in her review of Leaving the Atocha Station in the London Review of Books, “It’s hard not to take Adam’s life as a version of Lerner’s: both are young poets raised in Topeka, Kansas; both spent time in New York among ‘the dim kids of the stars’; both spent a year in Madrid on a poetry fellowship (Adam’s unnamed; Lerner’s a Fulbright).” See Sheila Heti, “I Hadn’t Even Seen the Alhambra,” London Review of Books 34.16 (August 2012).
112 Dean, “Listening.”
113 North, “The Rise.”
114 Katie Roiphe, “Her Struggle,” Slate (7 July 2014).
115 Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own,” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th Edition, Vol. B (New York: Norton, 2001), 2439.
116 Roiphe, “Her Struggle.”
117 Katie Roiphe, “Not Quite How a Person Should Be: Grow Up, Sheila Heti!” Slate (6 July 2012).
118 North, “The Rise.”
119 Edwards documents accusations of “oversharing,” levelled at Susan Cheever, Lena Chen, Joyce Maynard, Marie Calloway, Kathryn Harrison, Laurie Penny, and Sheila Heti. Lena Dunham is another frequent target of this rhetoric.
120 Edwards, “Enough.”
121 See Adam Robinson, “How Should a Person Be?” BOMB Magazine (11 June 2012), and La Force, “Sheila Heti.”
122 Heti, How, 3.
123 See Alison Flood, “Men Still Dominate Books World, Study Shows,” The Guardian (6 March 2013). Another depressingly illuminating set of statistics can be found in the infographic from the Canadian Women in the Literary Arts (CWILA): in 2013, 57 percent of the books reviewed in Canada were written by men, and only 25 percent of male critics reviewed a book written by a woman (“2013 CWILA Count”).