The question of how to be hence overlaps with that of how we can be at all: Where is an authentic person, a subject, located within this imitation? Is Sheila really there at all? I was always listening to their answers, so if I liked them, I could make them my answers too.” Sheila’s tape-recorder is a literal manifestation of what such imitation implies: a dead, mechanical thing, repeating perfectly, yet with nothing inside. I was always watching them to see what they were going to do in any situation, so I could do it too. For, as Sheila says at the outset, she tries to answer her question with yet more imitation: “For years and years I asked it of everyone I met. “I wanted to be an ideal, and believed marrying would make me into the upright, good-inside person I hoped to show the world.” Imitating a social ideal, Sheila takes nothing from it: “It was like I was not there at all-it was not me.” So begins an obsession with authenticity that finds itself caught up in paradox.

Really, however, she wants to pursue the title question-how should a person be?-which has preoccupied her since the collapse of her marriage. Subtitled “a novel from life,” its avatar-protagonist Sheila begins tape-recording conversations with her friends in the hope of inspiring dialogue for a play. Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010) re-treads this ground on a sunnier day. The only question to resolve is its flavor. If we are to write, betrayal is inevitable. The book is hence a kind of postmodern stitch-up in which Coetzee indicts himself and draws us into a maze with no discernable exit.

Coetzee in turn exploits Dostoevsky, and the novel’s moral question is yet more pointed when we learn that his own son died in a climbing accident. “They pay him lots of money for writing books,” thinks Dostoevsky, the words reportedly spoken by his dead son Pavel, whom he is about to betray by taking up his pen. What is more, an author can never be neutral on this matter.

They receive nothing, yet are stripped of autonomy and transformed into a literary type. What does it mean to exploit one’s life in one’s writing? It is also to exploit the lives of others-of friends, lovers and family-who are inevitably reduced and distorted in a written work. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg (1994), a fictive Dostoevsky ponders the question of writing as betrayal.

How a person should be sheila heti