Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character and the boundaries between fiction and memoir.
Both lines of investigation are furthered in this latest work, her most radical yet. It began when she decided to upload 10 years of her journal writing – 500,000 words in all – to an Excel spreadsheet, which ordered her sentences alphabetically. Then came the editing, a task she’s worked at, on and off, for more than a decade, winnowing the sentences so that only those she liked best remained.
