Writer Sheila Heti (Pure Colour; Motherhood) offers an experimental meditation on the self's development over time in her auto-fictional Alphabetical Diaries. Ten years ago, Heti returned to the diaries she'd kept for more than a decade. Meticulously recording each sentence from the diaries into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then alphabetizing them, she began looking for patterns, breakages, and touch points in her documentation of her own life.
The result is a book consisting of chapters organized by letter, an alphabetized list of her diary sentences no longer structured by time or narrative. Heti's alphabetized diary sentences originally were published as a 10-installment newsletter by the New York Times, but find new resonance in this novel-esque form. Readers can't help but search for narrative meaning in a book divided into chapters. But when such a throughline is elusive, other ways of understanding, organizing, and processing the fleeting and seemingly everyday moments of the writer-narrator's life surface.
Like Heti's own way of looking for patterns and disruption in her diaries' re-arranged sentences, readers will recognize moments of repetition and juxtaposition in Alphabetical Diaries' sentences. In one early section, the narrator offers a list of desires: "A desire to do acting. A desire to help people. A desire to uplift humanity." While it might be the repetition that immediately catches the eye, it's Heti's lists' slight differences that give them resonance: "But love can endure. But love is not enough." This mutability, likely true of most diaries--and most people's internal lives--is put on display here through the compression of time, which allows almost every sentence to read like a profound truth, only to have the next sentence complicate it.
While people and specific events figure prominently in these sentences, without context, the emotive nature of Heti's precise language takes center stage. In lines like "I want to tear him apart with my teeth and feel his blood all over my mouth," readers are thrown into the stark reality of feelings made flesh. These sentences offer a raw, near-relentless encounter with the intimate ways the narrator experiences herself. And while the book offers more questions about that self than it does answers, it also carves out space for readers, too, to pause with what kinds of feelings, desires, and thoughts might inform their own lives. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor
Shelf Talker: A thought-provoking experiment in self-reflection and prose, Alphabetical Diaries is perhaps Sheila Heti's most intimate and most universal book yet.