Not Quite How a Person Should Be

Heti does not bother to make herself likable, which is perhaps one of the admirable or brave things about the book, but people like her because she is voicing something that they seem to want voiced. She is articulating the entitled, impatient waiting for laurels that smart, educated, urban people in their 20s and 30s and even 40s seem to spend a lot of time doing, the feeling that the world should recognize your intelligence and extraordinariness and reward you for just being you. The feeling is that your coolness, your wryness, is enough, that you shouldn?t actually have to do anything for this admiration to come to you, that your art is in your stylish haphazard way of being. You can be very ambitious, and ironic about your ambition at the same very stylish moment. As Heti puts it: ?Everyone would know in their hearts that I am the most famous person alive?but not talk about it too much. And for no one to be too interested in taking my picture, for they?d all carry around in their heads an image of me that was unchanging, startling, and magnetic.?

Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=fce8daaf0c3619982ff4d76642473dde

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