Drawn From Life: Sheila Heti Talks About "How Should a Person Be?" Sheila Heti's "How Should a Person Be?" is a novel that draws heavily on the real lives of Ms. Heti and her artistic friends in Toronto. With its experimental form, graphic talk about sex, philosophical musings about female friendship and portraits of sometimes befuddled adults, it has inspired a wide range of reaction. In The New York Times Book Review, David Haglund wrote that "the novel shares with much reality television a kind of episodic aimlessness, and a focus on young, self-­involved characters who spend a lot of time thinking about how they look to other people," and that "Heti sees the silliness in the desire for fame that drives such fare, but she also knows that same desire is involved in the impulse to make art." In a recent e-mail interview, Ms. Heti discussed writing about people she knows, why a little boredom in art can't hurt, and other things. The book is subtitled "A Novel From Life," though much of it reads like memoir and several major characters appear to be real-life people. How much of the book, if any of it, is strictly fiction? I don't understand "strictly fiction." I wrote this book to answer the question posed by its title. It's a question that was very real to me, and I wanted to use everything at my disposal, including the things I was encountering in the world, the things I was imagining and more. I wasn't worrying about fiction or nonfiction. I was just concerned with working my way to the end of that question in the best way I could, using whatever I could. In the book, Sheila says: "I like boring people. I think it's a virtue. People should be a little bored. What does that mean, and is the book tactically boring in some way? I hope so. Some of my favorite experiences of art are when I am there but my attention has wandered. I think stimulation is overrated, and persistent stimulation is exhausting. You sometimes have to be banal, tedious; make the rhythm go soft and slow, give the mind a rest. I'd rather that people could be both entertained and given rest while reading my book, than for someone to have to put the book down to take a rest. You can't just be lighting firecrackers all the time. You spent a brief amount of time in New York City because it seemed like the place to become an important artist. Why did you leave? Are you talking about me or the character? We both spent time in New York. If you mean me, I lived there one summer because I was in a relationship with a guy who had a job there. In late August, we returned to Toronto. Toronto is my home. It's where my family is. I think I feel an obligation to be within subway distance of the people who raised me. If you mean my character, she returned to Toronto once she realized that the real reason she had run away to New York was to escape a debt at home. You can run to things, but you probably shouldn't run away from them. Sheila works in a salon for a while, and compares two hairstylists, one who envisioned himself as an artist ("He would dye customers" hair without telling them, if he thought it would make them look better ... ") and another who had "the simple goal of the craftsman: excellence.... He did everything perfectly, and the same way every time." What's your opinion of the balance between precise craftsmanship and looseness in art? I think both are very important. I think every great artist is also a great craftsman, knows what they're doing, and has a certain amount of control over their hand. But I think an artist must also allow for the possibility of being surprised while working, and should follow what seem like irrational impulses. It's a paradox, maybe, to talk about it, but when you're working, it doesn't feel that way. It feels harmonious. Maybe you have to learn to respond loosely in a skillful way. There are convincing moments in the book when characters react badly to how they're portrayed in someone else's words or art. How much did you fear using your friends as raw material? Have there been any bad reactions to it? First, many of my friends were working in a similar way at the time. Margaux Williamson used me and Sholem Krishtalka in her movie, "Teenager Hamlet," playing versions of ourselves. Sholem has painted many of our friends. My ex-husband, Carl Wilson, wrote about me in his book, "Let's Talk About Love." We had lots of reasons for this, including limited resources. That said, I did have fears, and so did Margaux, so we had endless conversations about it. She read countless drafts. I talked with Misha Glouberman about the book, too. Ms. Heti collaborated with Mr. Glouberman on a previous book, "The Chairs Are Where the People Go." That talking was very important. I didn't anticipate it, but found it fascinating to have the people I love, who are in certain ways my characters, say, after reading a draft, "You wrote that Margaux would forgive Sheila, but I would never forgive you if you apologized like that!" This taught me things about living and things about writing. There were some bad reactions, in some moments, but not as many as you might think, and in the end we were all O.K. There are several - but somewhat fleeting - mentions of Jewishness in the book. What role does being Jewish play in your life and your work? And what part of that did you want to explore in this book? My impression from observing my father at religious dinners, from the time I was a child, is that a person is not a Jew because one has faith, but because one asks questions of Judaism. I'm not sure that any living member of my immediate family could be mistaken for a believer or religiously observant, but questions have always been important to me, and a sign of faith. The characters in my book are wandering; they're aiming for the Promised Land, but, like the Jews of the Bible, are fated not to enter it. In the Bible, it's not the Jews who leave Egypt who reach the Promised Land, but the generation that comes after them. I saw a correspondence between our generation's damned worship of the self and that generation's damned worship of the Golden Calf. In both cases, the worship of false idols screws them up. There are passages about sex that are very graphic, both in language and in emotion, and kind of jarring compared to the rest of the book. What was behind your choice to adopt that tone for those scenes? Sometimes sex is very jarring, so the writing had to be, too. Some of my favorite writers are Marquis de Sade, Henry Miller, Georges Bataille and Antonin Artaud. I much prefer to see artists use sex in a way that's counter to how popular culture wants us to see sex, which is just this happenstance between two bodies, only a few degrees different from sitting across a conference table.