Twelve years ago, the writer Sheila Heti published a short list of her favorite “secret self-help” books, offering only the criteria that each book had “actually helped me—they’re both precious and ...

When you purchase an independently reviewed book through our site, we earn an affiliate commission. By Alexandra Kleeman PURE COLOUR By Sheila Heti As a child, I invented a private taxonomy to sort my ...

In the last scene of “How Should a Person Be?,” Sheila Heti’s 2010 autofiction about Toronto bohemians, Sheila watches her friends playing on a squash court and realizes that, although they’re having ...

A decade later, Heti is still thought of as a writer of “autofiction,” like Ben Lerner, Rachel Cusk, and Tao Lin—writers who bring the freedom of fiction to the story of their own lives. But in her ...

She has written about some of our biggest modern-day conundrums: whether to have children, how to live an authentic life. With her new novel, “Pure Colour,” she considers how love and art can heal. By ...

Sheila Heti first came to real critical attention with her 2012 novel, “How Should a Person Be?” The strange phrasing of that book’s title — not who or what but how should a person be — implied that ...

I don’t deny that some of her work has autobiographical content. How Should a Person Be? hews closely to Heti’s coming-of-age as a writer in a small circle of young artists in Toronto, and the ...

Sheila Heti is famous for writing about herself. Her early fiction is abstract, sometimes fable-like, but her breakthrough 2010 novel How Should a Person Be? comes explicitly from her life: it helped ...

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