"Does it Have to be a Play?": Autofiction as Theatrical Failure in Sheila Heti's How Should a Person Be?

In Sheila Heti's 2010 novel How Should a Person Be? theatre is invoked both in subject and form; the novel details the protagonist, an autofictional analogue of Heti herself, struggling to complete a commissioned play, but it also incorporates play-texts in the finished version of the novel. Drawing on David Kurnick's Empty Houses: Theatrical Failure and the Novel , this chapter examines how Heti's work functions as a contemporary and self-conscious extension of Kurnick's modernist failures, in which the theatrical failure is incorporated into the successful novel rather than merely acting as a catalyst for writing the novel. Furthermore, it argues that Heti integrates theatre and theatrical form into her novel as a way to exceed the boundaries of the self established by the autofictional genre, which in turn provides a site of negotiation against the singularity of the autofictional narrator. Through populating her novel with the spectre of the stage, the performers, and the audience, Heti's use of theatrical elements affords her novel a sense of collective and political agency that contradicts the prevalent view of autofiction as hermetically self-referential, self-absorbed, or toothless.