Meeting Dates:
3/27, 4/17, 5/8
In Person at The Center for Fiction

Session I: A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

Session II: How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti

Session III: All Fours by Miranda July

Sheila Heti’s delightfully astute novel How Should a Person Be? pursues its title’s question with a winning combination of zest and philosophical gravity: How do any of us actually know how to act in the world?

In this reading group, we’ll look at three novels where female protagonists face confusion surrounding how best to live—and as women, how best to live free from gendered social constraints. We’ll start with a 19th-century novel, E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, where the protagonist has to slowly unknit everything she’s learned about “how a woman should be” in order to find—possibly—happiness.

Investigating the ways in which our first protagonist’s transfiguration has been constrained by a male author within the confines of a marriage plot, we’ll swivel to two contemporary and feminist takes on confusion where women in mid-life furiously interrogate and re-write social scripts in a move towards sexual and creative freedom. All three novels ask serious questions about how a person should be, hinting at both the stakes and creative possibilities of confusion.