MEMOIR
Alphabetical Diaries
Sheila Heti, Allen & Unwin, $24.99
Sheila Heti’s new book Alphabetical Diaries is as its name suggests: a book composed of sentences taken from her diaries, arranged alphabetically and assembled in 26 chapters from A to Z. The result is a compelling work that feels both formally brand new, and therefore disorienting, and uncannily familiar in its evocations of life.
Defined as an “essay”, like all of Heti’s books, Alphabetical Diaries eludes categorisation and continues her ongoing investigations into her own life and art, which she conducts with an almost scientific rigour. As she writes: “That’s all I want to know, what the human laws are.”
The author of 11 books – including the acclaimed works of fiction, How Should a Person Be? (2010), Motherhood (2018) and Pure Colour (2022) – Heti pushes literature into places that resist language to capture the texture of lived experience. She is always experimenting. After How Should a Person Be? was published, she decided to examine the diaries she’d kept while writing it. She wanted to distinguish her life from her art: to learn what her life was actually like during those years when she was writing the novel based on it – a novel narrated mostly in the first-person singular by a protagonist called Sheila. This urge is neatly captured in a diary fragment: “No one at this point in history knows how to live, so we read biographies and memoirs, hoping to get some clues.”
To allow herself to scan her diaries quickly, Heti put them in a spreadsheet, sorted the sentences alphabetically, then spent a decade editing them. The result is a volume of 163 densely packed pages of sentences with no paragraph breaks that scroll through the alphabet, capturing moments of life with revelatory frankness and immediacy.
It opens: “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together in its binding. A book is like a shopping mart, all the selections.”
Heti’s diaries capture moments of life with revelatory frankness and immediacy.
How to read such a book? At the end of the first page this sentence suggested a way: “A different way of living now, according to my feelings and values, rather than according to stories and symbols.”
So, perhaps this is a book that offers life in terms of feelings and values? But no, of course not, because this is composed from life and contains all the fleetingness of the author’s thinking, its repetitions, obsessions, contradictions, recurring people, things and places: “My main wish for life right now is not to think about men all the time, but to ever more think about men less and less, and to look around at the world, and at my books, and at the books I want to write and the work I want to do, and get over my neuroses about everything and stop smoking and feel my own will, which is my soul, and to have some control over how I react, and to be in the world in a more thoughtful way, and to come out of childhood and be a woman at last. My middle finger is still hurting from when I slammed it in the door.”