After wanting to read Sheila Heti’s much-hyped “novel from life” How Should a Person Be? for months, I finally broke down and ordered it at the end of February. When I reviewed it for my book club last week, I did have to ask my them never to read it, lest they judge me for enjoying something so pretentious.

The book examines several themes: the essential question of how to be a good person or live a good life, female friendship, using material from your friends as a source for your art with or without their consent, beauty, ugliness, desire, and art. It includes a lot of recorded conversations between the real life Toronto artists who form Heti’s intimate circle: Margaux Williamson, Sholem Krishtalka, Ryan Kamstra and Misha Glouberman.

Sholem Krishtalka wrote an essay which you can find here on being a character in someone else’s work. “Through my friendship with [Sheila and Margaux], I lived through their projects’ simultaneous four-or-so year gestation period: excited talks at brunch or at parties about how it was all going, seeing rough cuts, reading through drafts, negotiating the thorny ethics of fictionalizing one’s friends. Throughout, the completion of both projects seemed impossibly distant. But now they are things in the world: Margaux released the DVD of her movie and Sheila released her book on the same night in mid-October. I figure prominently in both, and that is not easy; I am now also a thing in the world, and not a thing of my own making.” (emphasis mine)

Krishtalka himself has an ongoing project called Lurking in which he makes paintings and drawings of photos his friends post on Facebook. Some of them work as art which stands alone, and others feel more like illustrations. He doesn’t say explicitly whether he asks for permission from his subjects, but the title ‘Lurking’ would seem to imply that he does not.

Lurking 279 May 2 2012 – Sholem Krishtalka