How Should a Person Be?

Set in contemporary Toronto, the novel follows Sheila, a writer consumed by the question of how a person should be. She watches everyone she meets, hoping to assemble an identity from the traits she admires in others. Recently divorced and creatively stalled, she orbits a small circle of friends: Margaux, a painter and her closest companion; Misha, Margaux's boyfriend; Sholem, a painter who recently completed his Master of Fine Arts degree; and Jon, Sholem's boyfriend. The book blends novelistic narration, transcribed conversations, emails, and interior monologue across five acts.

Sheila introduces Margaux as her complement: Margaux paints Sheila's portrait while Sheila records Margaux's words, each making the other feel seen. She recalls that Margaux's mother says Margaux's first words were "Who cares?", a phrase that captures something essential about Margaux's character.

During a Sunday brunch, a conversation about ugliness leads to the Ugly Painting Competition: Margaux and Sholem will each try to make the ugliest painting possible. Sholem goes home and paints everything he hates when his students do it, including cartoonish eyes, gross colors, and the careless caption "The sun will come out tomorrow." The process disgusts him so deeply he emails the group that he feels violated. Margaux has not begun.

Sheila recounts her backstory in parallel. She married young, hoping commitment would repair something broken inside her, but on her wedding day she involuntarily mimicked a bride she had once observed, crying without feeling the emotion. Earlier, her high school boyfriend wrote a cruel play prophesying her future: a life ending degraded and alone. During her marriage, a strange six-month period overtook her, every day replaying the sensations of an earlier August. One evening she told her husband she could not stay. She woke the next morning to lightness but also the loss of the intuitive destiny that had guided her life.

She first met Margaux at one of the parties she and her husband hosted. Margaux's freedom made Sheila feel both threatened and drawn. Their friendship developed slowly, and when Margaux sent an email expressing her longing for a close female friend, Sheila was moved and agreed to visit her studio.

A feminist theater company has commissioned Sheila to write a play about women, but she has spent years unable to finish it. She takes a job at a high-end salon run by Uri, a disciplined German hairdresser whose consistency she admires. She also buys a silver tape recorder, beginning the habit of recording conversations.

When Sheila asks to record Margaux for help with the play, Margaux resists, saying her greatest fear is her words floating separate from her body. She relents but asks: "Just promise you won't betray me." Sheila consults Ann, her Jungian analyst, who warns her about the puer aeternus, a psychological archetype of the eternal child who abandons every endeavor at the first difficulty. The dangerous thing, Ann says, is the everlasting switching, not what one chooses.

Despite declaring herself celibate, Sheila begins a consuming sexual relationship with Israel, a man she met at a poetry party. She recognizes how the affair pulls her from her work but cannot resist.

Margaux's gallerist takes paintings to the Scope art fair in Miami, and Sheila tags along. They discuss art and ambition while visiting fairs. Margaux declares, "I don't care about success. I have it in my heart now." Back in Toronto, Margaux sends an email expressing hurt that Sheila bought the same yellow dress she was buying, calling it a violation of identity. Sheila, hurt and shocked, does not reply.

Margaux comes to Sheila's door to insist the friendship is not over. She tells the parable of the spider from their Miami hotel: they kept a daddy longlegs in the bathroom and Sheila grew fond of it, but when it crawled into their bed, Sheila killed it instinctively. "Barriers," Margaux says. "We need them. They let you love someone. Otherwise you might kill them."

They develop a routine of daytime work and nighttime oblivion with drinking and cocaine. When Margaux returns Sheila's tape recorder with a solo recording saying she always fantasized about meeting a girl as serious as she was, Sheila writes for the first time in months. She produces not the play but a narrative about their conversations, using Margaux's words. She gives Margaux the pages.

The consequences are devastating. At a group art show, Sheila discovers Margaux has contributed a self-portrait as a greedy Buddha figurine titled Margaux Souvenir. Sheila recognizes it as Margaux's ugly painting, reflecting her worst fears about being a painter who turns her back on the world's suffering. At Margaux's apartment, Sheila finds her quilting in the dark, her studio empty. Sheila realizes she stole Margaux's words, creating a distorted mirror that made Margaux doubt herself. She resolves to leave the city.

At the bus station, Sheila uses a book called Important Artists to determine New York is the obvious destination. In New York, she emails the theater to pull the play. Israel sends sexually explicit commands, asking her to write him a letter while exposing herself. She complies partway before realizing the absurdity: She has spent years unable to write her play, yet here she is fluently flattering Israel's ego. She flees in shame. After a night in Atlantic City, she dreams of burying Margaux's severed head and wakes knowing she must go home.

Back in Toronto, she finds a letter from Margaux accusing her of betrayal: recording her only to learn how a person should be, then abandoning her. They argue on Margaux's stoop. "All my life all I wanted was a girl!" Margaux says. "And then when I needed her, she disappeared." Sheila resigns from the salon, and Uri bleaches her hair completely as a parting gesture, leaving her looking like an old woman, "erased."

Sheila returns to Margaux wanting to make things right. Margaux tells her: "I want you to finish your play." She gives Sheila permission to use anything, including Margaux's words, to answer the question of how a person should be. Sheila asks if it has to be a play. Margaux grins: "No." Margaux describes her own breakthrough: she is making a movie, like throwing sand on an invisible castle to reveal its shape. She tells Sheila she considered her an "invariable," a fixed element of her life.

Sheila meets Israel one final time. The charge between them has died. She makes a deliberate, ugly choice, pressing her face against his body until his desire extinguishes, enduring the humiliation. The next morning he leaves a quarter on the windowsill. For the first time, Sheila feels she has made a choice not in the hopes of being admired, and from it comes genuine clarity.

She begins to write, throwing all the difficult material inside her onto the page: "I finally became a real girl." At a theater intermission, she encounters her ex-husband, and they speak with tenderness. She wonders whether her high school boyfriend's prophecy might not be her fate after all.

The group gathers for the long-delayed Ugly Painting Competition. Sholem's entry is genuinely ugly. Margaux presents Woman Time, an instinctual abstract whose essential quality, her inescapable artistic touch, survives despite her intentions. No winner is declared. On Margaux's birthday, Sheila delivers champagne she promised long ago, and Margaux tells her, "I have never had a kinder friend . . . or a more difficult one." Alone afterward, Sheila meditates on boundaries and singularity, resolving to protect what she values. Sholem proposes settling the competition through a squash match, but from the observation deck, no one can determine the score. Jon observes: "I don't think they even know the rules. I think they're just slamming the ball around." The novel ends without a winner, the two painters simply playing.