The moment I finished reading Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be I started searching for Margaux Williamson’s paintings online. The book, which calls itself “A Novel From Life,” tracks Heti’s adventures among the young bohemians of Toronto. It’s self-conscious literary tone and explicit descriptions of her love life have earned the young writer some notoriety, and also comparisons to Lena Dunham. I actually think Heti describes artistic ambition and physical love quite powerfully. But the real subject of the book is female friendship, and how a strong one can sustain one emotionally and intellectually. At the heart of the book is Heti’s relationship with her best friend Margaux Williamson, which is challenged as their identities swerve too close to one another during a trip to Miami, and then recovered when they’re both back home and able to identify the very particular ways each supports and inspires the other.
Heti’s language is light and she describes things by brushing over them. The memoir, though it covers one year chronologically, has a porous quality, as if it’s a mass of memories captured at just that moment before they settle into a proper novel (from life). Williamson’s paintings are, necessarily, concrete. But there’s a similar hovering quality in her hand. There’s also a wonderful dissonance in the way she locates figures wthin space. The people she paints are often at odds, both spatially and dramatically, with their surroundings, as if they’re trapped inside the wrong world. Do Williamson’s paintings illustrate Heti’s book? No, but they give voice to the same kind of searching, unsettled spirit. Expressed so precisely by these two artists, this condition might be a sign of the times.