17 for 2017: Sheila Heti recommends The Normal Personality: A New Way of Thinking about People

2. The Normal Personality: A New Way of Thinking about People by Steven Reiss recommended by Sheila Heti.

Throughout my tenure as the December Writer-In-Residence, I will be assembling a list of 17 must-read-books for 2017. To accomplish this numerically satisfying task, I have asked 17 people whose work I adore to suggest one title for the list. Consult the end of each post for the growing list of recommendations!  

In addition to writing books, Sheila Heti is responsible for creating Trampoline Hall, a lecture series in Toronto wherein humans are invited to speak on subjects about which they are not experts. She once invited me to give a lecture about having a penis, but I’ll save that story for another day. I read Sheila’s words long before I met her in person. During the press tour for her book How Should a Person Be? I remember feeling immediately enamoured upon reading her answer to a very simple question. A reporter asked Heti about how she handles criticism, and the disappointment expressed by some readers about her books lack of – how shall I say – reader hand-holding. Her response? “You shouldn’t expect a book to ask you about your day.” You can find Sheila’s writing in The Believer and McSweeney’s, and most recently in this interview with Elena Ferrante. If you are interested in my writing about Sheila, you can find it under my bed in a small black diary.

From Sheila:

I don't even know why I bought this book, I suppose because I wanted to know if my personality was normal. Steven Reiss suggests that there are 16 basic desires or values, and each person has these 16 in varying degrees. So for instance, for one person, status, vengeance and idealism might be particularly dominant values, while for another, curiosity, order and romance might be the forces which motivate them most strongly. He shows how it's a way of thinking about compatibility in relationships (saying that the happier relationships tend to be between people who share similar basic desires) and it's also a way of understanding how we are all "normal" even if we are all different—we may not share the same values, but we all are motivated by our desires and values. It's not a self-help book, it's kind of an academic text, but very pleasurable to read and under 200 pages. I look at it again every few years.

Stay tuned as we build the ultimate 2017 reading list! A new suggestion from an inspired thinker emerges every-other-day for the month of December on open-book.ca.

17 for 2017:

1. Mariko Tamaki recommends The Land of Forgotten Girls

December Writer-In-Residence

Chase Joynt is a filmmaker and writer. His latest two films Genderize and Between You and Me are now streaming live online with CBC Digital Docs. His first book, You Only Live Twice (co-authored with Mike Hoolboom) was published by Coach House Books and just named one of The Globe and Mail's Best Books of 2016. His second book The Case of Agnes (co-authored with Kristen Schilt) is forthcoming from Duke University Press.