Author(s): Sheila Heti

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Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. In the vein of Joe Brainard's I Remember and Edouard Levé's Autoportrait, passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are the alphabetical diaries.

‘[A] pointillist description of the raging, vacillating, euphoric, despairing turbulence of Heti’s mind…. Heti has turned the pitfalls of the diary form – the relentless self-absorption, the combination of trivia and pathos – into a dazzling aesthetic virtue. Like a hologram, this book refracts an endlessly shifting light.’
— Claire Allfree, Telegraph

‘The rhythms and repetitions create a lyrical effect, elevating the often prosaic nature of diary entries...The fun comes from reading the sentences as something cumulative, an effect that shouldn’t work, yet often does…’
— Susie Mesure, Financial Times

‘I found reading Alphabetical Diaries to be a profound experience…There is something of Anaïs Nin’s journals in Alphabetical Diaries, and of Iris Murdoch’s letters, and of Edna O’Brien’s memoirs. Something locked-in and bristling. Heti is wrestling openly with the things that matter.’
— Dwight Garner, New York Times

‘The resulting book is exhilarating: both intimate and withholding, repetitive and generative, undeniably self-centred and yet moving beyond the self.’
— Anna Leszkiewicz, New Statesman

‘Whether it should be considered a memoir or something else entirely, Alphabetical Diaries looks at how we see ourselves and how we’d like to be seen.’
— Time

‘The alphabetised sentences give the book momentum and entertaining accidents of language create intriguing micro-stories on every page…readers who enjoy Heti’s fiction should be enthralled. The picture of a committed, inventive, sincere writer and the times she lives in, which emerges from this experiment, is fascinating.’
— Max Liu, i News

‘[O]ne of the freshest, funniest and most ingenious humans writing today… one of our best living authors.’
— Becca Rothfeld, Washington Post

‘Heti's books aim to be vessels for the transformation of reader and writer. She has spoken of writing a book that would be like a Richard Serra sculpture, which a reader might walk through in the same way that the writer has undergone its creation, not knowing exactly where it is heading or how it will end... Though the formal challenges vary, Heti is always pressing at the membrane between life and art, beauty and ugliness’
— Parul Sehgal, New Yorker

‘Sheila Heti keeps transforming my idea of writing. Her Alphabetical Diaries isn’t just dirty and funny and poignant; it reproposes everything you thought about a self and the way time passes.’ 
— Adam Thirlwell, author of The Future Future

‘Alphabetical Diaries is a testament to Heti’s artistic power. She gently leads the reader into new dimensions of language previously undiscovered. Beautiful and uncompromising.’
— Marlowe Granados, author of Happy Hour

'A book that is in many ways is an ode to the sentence; from the muscle of single line to the power that comes with accrual. An immersive and hugely entertaining read.'
— Sinéad Gleeson author of Constellations

‘I am drawn to Sheila Heti’s writing like a moth to a flame and Alphabetical Diaries is amongst the most affecting, exquisite books I’ve ever encountered. It is, simply put, utterly and startlingly good. Heti writes so creaturely, so bodily, that it feels like a whole new genre is being formed as we read.’
— Kerri ní Dochartaigh author of Cacophony of Bone

‘I’ll read anything Sheila Heti writes.’
— Lauren Oyler, author of Fake Accounts

‘Like Iris Murdoch’s novels, Heti’s are philosophically intense, although Heti's work is pared down where Murdoch's was Rabelaisian.’
— Dwight Garner, New York Times

 ‘Heti’s cerebral, romantic sensibility rises to the surface; a page and a half of maybes; a page of perhapses; lists of I wants, I wases, I wents and I wills…. she paints a life both touched by human connection yet with a loneliness at its center. Alphabetical Diaries is a feat of creativity, demonstrating Heti’s considered yet candid mastery of language and storytelling.’
— Paula Lacey, The Skinny

‘By fragmenting and then formulaically rearranging these personal records, Heti has reinvigorated them as more than a journal, brought them to life as a fascinating book which highlights the consistency and inconsistencies of us all, how our minds flit from subject to subject to elsewhere. It is a warm-hearted, individual, exploration of what it is to be alive, what it is to be human.’
— Rupert Loydall, Tears in the Fence

‘Sheila Heti is a master of form, constantly expanding the bounds of fiction while expertly defamiliarizing the experience of being human, ultimately drawing you closer to it.’
— Nylon

‘A profoundly unusual, experimental, yet engrossing work of not-quite-memoir…for those who can understand her ambition beyond the form, settling into the rhythm of Heti’s poetic observations gives way to a rich narrative reward.’
— Lauren Puckett-Pope, Elle

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THOMAS'S REVIEW:

Alphabetisation is a way to achieve this. Alphabetisation as an organising principle at least possesses the virtue of scientific rigour. Alphabetisation is very clean, even when that which is alphabetised is very dirty (I mean dirty in a non-pejorative sense). Although it appears to be a principle that organises without adding meaning to that which is organised, a principle that organises without aiding understanding of that which is organised, that is actually its virtue. Although the experiences to which our memories relate may have been temporally organised, if organised is the right word, our memories are themselves certainly not temporally organised. Diaries are not memories, but memories could be somehow rescued from diaries, if we only knew how. Do we force new conjunctions of meaning upon sentences that abut each other merely due to their alphabetical sequence, and is this a good thing? Experimental writing needs to follow a rigorously scientific method to yield interesting results. Heti could have alphabetised all the words or alphabetised all the letters, but these, although they may have some scientific or statistical value (probably a fairly low value, I would guess), would not have been very interesting. Heti took ten years of her diary entries and put all the sentences into alphabetical order. Heti’s text is 60000 words long; my review is not long enough to be interesting. How would we arrange our lives, our thoughts, if we did not use time as a method of arrangement? I am aware that I am unlikely to do this, for reasons that could reasonably be labelled laziness. I, at least, can seldom stretch my comprehension beyond a sentence. I do not think that my attempt is very successful (even though it doesn’t need to be very successful; somewhat successful would be sufficient), but why not? I do not think that we would have got bored, though we do get bored of many things. Is this interesting? I was going to say that the way in which the book is written transforms its contents, or the context of the contents, changing our experience of the contents from what it would otherwise have been. In any case, you will find Alphabetical Diaries funny, tender, poignant, and certainly good company (or maybe it’s the author who is good company). In presenting Heti’s thoughts non-temporally arranged, the book resembles a personality, which is also a phenomenon non-temporally arranged, similarly expressed from sequentially lived experience. Is this an interesting way to proceed? It is, however, difficult to determine by what principle our memories are organised, if they can be said to be organised at all, or, if they are organised, whether they are organised by a principle, if it is not impossible to be organised without a principle of organisation. It presents that which it organises without imposing a meaning or context that would dictate or influence our understanding. Living, I suppose, is a forwardly propulsive phenomenon, temporally speaking, and reading also is forwardly propulsive wherever it lands upon a text. Memories appear to be associatively organised, which is what could be called a slippery principle of organisation, or a soft principle of organisation. Memory, however, is not forwardly propulsive. Now I will put all my sentences into alphabetical order. Otherwise the knowledge that the method will in due course be applied to it may influence the writing of the text. Perhaps there is a quantum length of text at which alphabetisation reveals repetitions, patterns, tendencies that might otherwise not be noticed (that is to say, in a shorter text). Perhaps, though, the alphabetical method, if we can call it a method, only really works if the author of the text to which it is applied is unaware of its future application to the text. Plot is as artificial in texts as it is in our lives. Reading would not be reading if it didn’t have propulsion. Really it is the having of memories that is associatively organised and perhaps not the memories themselves, if there are such things as memories that are separate from the having of them, which  I doubt (though it is hard to say where memories come from if there are not). Really, the alphabetisation of the sentences is an editorial intervention that is more part of the process of reading than of writing. Surprising results are only surprising if we are surprised by them. The alphabetisation dictates how we access the text. The alphabetisation is a morselisation of the writing and has much in common with the way in which we access memory, which also appears in morsels. The book in many ways is a celebration of the sentence because the sentence is the form preserved or foregrounded by the alphabetisation. The sentence is an optimum unit of interest. This is interesting. This makes me want to apply Heti’s alphabetical method to pre-existing works of literature to see what the method may reveal about them once they are liberated from their traditionally temporal arrangement. Time is a harder principle of organisation than association but it is a softer principle than alphabetisation. Time is almost as soft a principle as association. We must free ourselves from plot. We used to read sections of the Alphabetical Diaries when they appeared online about a year ago in The New York Times back when we subscribed to The New York Times, largely, in the end, to read the Alphabetical Diaries. We would read the latest instalment of the Alphabetical Diaries aloud in bed each Sunday morning, alternating the reading so that we could also drink coffee while reading the Alphabetical Diaries. We would still happily be reading instalments of The Alphabetical Diaries in bed on Sunday mornings if the alphabet and our subscription to The New York Times had not run out at pretty much the same time. Why do I present all my ideas, if they can be said to be ideas, as questions? Will my review obscure the book it addresses in the way my reviews typically obscure the books they address? Would it be possible to write a review of this book in the way that the book itself is written, alphabetising the sentences in the review? Would such a review illuminate the book in a way that adds something to our, or my at least, understanding of it? You might think that reading someone else’s diary, especially when they are presented without a diary’s traditional organising principle, would become boring if it did not start out boring, but Heti’s sentences are compelling, compoundingly so, either because she has interesting thoughts; or because her thoughts, vulnerabilities, longings and so forth are entirely relatable, if that is not too nauseating a term, even if they are not interesting per se; or because boredom is a temporal phenomenon that has been excluded or bamboozled by the form.