LOS ANGELES, CA (2010) "How Should Sheila Heti Be?"

Could a young woman novelist even get published if she wasn't, in some way, anti-male?

Sheila Heti

*

2010 was a lifetime ago. It’s hard to grasp now. A time when everybody got along, there were no glaring political or ideological divisions. You could like any kind of art, any kind of book or movie. Straight people watched AIDS dramas. Black kids liked Harry Potter. Feminists laughed at romantic comedies. Rappers sampled Led Zeppelin.

You could do what you wanted. You could say almost anything. Nobody was worried about being overheard at work or offending someone at a dinner party.

In 2010, I was a successful mainstream writer, cranking out Young Adult books at major publishing houses. Naturally, I was happy with the publishing world and the entertainment industry. Or maybe “happy” is the wrong word. I lived in it. I breathed and absorbed it. I understood it. It supported me.

Naturally, I kept tabs on all the different art forms for any interesting new trends or aesthetic movements. I did this for professional reasons and for my own enjoyment. I constantly scanned the horizon for anything exciting, innovative, or new. Nothing was off limits.

How innocent a time it was. How unbelievably free we were.

*

*

In 2010, my radar picked up a low-key but persistent buzz around a first novel called How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti.

Henry Holt, the American publisher, was on a roll at the time, having recently published a string of interesting off-beat first novels.

I got the book from the library. Generally, I read about twenty pages of a new novel. Just enough to get a feel for it. But How Should a Person Be? surprised me. It was so smart and funny. Its cheery, conversational style was addictive.

*

The first-person narrator, “Sheila Heti”, was a somewhat adrift, young female playwright, who is trying to find her place in the world.

The plot was slight: Sheila becomes enamored with a fellow female creative (a painter), who seems to have found the proper mix of indifference and sophistication to live an admirable artistic life. The two young women and a gay male artist form a close-knit, art-centric friend group. They become a world unto themselves. And the story evolves from there.

I flew through the novel. It was really good. Great writing. Great characters. Fully worthy of the buzz. I finished the book in a couple of days and was soon talking it up to friends.

*

So then time passed. Four years later, Trump rode down the escalator. Soon after, “woke” was born. Cancel Culture. MeToo. George Floyd. Kyle Rittenhouse.

The entire country separated into two opposing camps. There were massive protests and internet flame wars. Lines were drawn. Friendships destroyed. Riots became normal. Violence became commonplace.

And then COVID-19 appeared and created more chaos. It gave us new things to fight about. Instead of people coming together to deal with the pandemic, people became angrier and more divided than they already were.

*

By 2023, things had calmed down somewhat. At least on the surface.

One thing that affected me personally was the new ideological nature of the entertainment industry. All these new political conflicts were being played out in films, music, books, and advertising.

The result was a drastic lowering of quality. Woke movies sucked. Right wing movies sucked. Mainstream book publishing dedicated itself to Social Justice. Most of those books sucked. Even the rare attempts at politically neutral art somehow sucked. Everything just sucked.