Alphabetical Diaries
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Critics Top Book of the Year • Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker • Literary Hub • Electric Literature • The Los Angeles Times • The New Statesman
Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade's worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
With previous books like Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, author Sheila Heti mined the minutiae of her life to assemble jazzy, meandering fiction that reflects the way our minds work—roaming free, but also rehashing the same questions over and over again. In Alphabetical Diaries, Heti takes a different tack, organizing a decade’s worth of sentences from her journals alphabetically into something like a long prose poem divided into chapters for each letter. Yes, it’s a gimmick, but somehow this short, strange book ignites the imagination, inviting us to fill in the blanks and paint our own pictures of the people, conversations, and events that inspired Heti’s musings. We’ll be dipping into it again and again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this arresting literary experiment, Canadian novelist and playwright Heti (Pure Colour) takes sentences from 10 years of her personal journal entries and rearranges them in alphabetical order. "Don't forget that although you aren't telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead readers through an experience," Heti writes, providing a kind of cipher for the idiosyncratic format. What the book lacks in traditional narrative structure, Heti supplements with evocative snapshots of life, detailing broken love affairs, mediocre meals, and professional triumphs with the controlled chaos of a late-night thought spiral. She juxtaposes the mundane ("My book will be done this year!") and the profound ("I wonder if I wanted to be a writer because nobody ever told me the truth"). The arcs of friendships and romantic relationships are sliced up and remixed, raising subtextual questions about the linearity of time and the nature of change. While the format might grate in lesser hands, and certain sections (the lengthy "I"s in particular) will test the endurance of even the most forgiving readers, Heti's penchant for aphorism and sentence-level excellence keep things afloat ("Don't want to be killed, but if I am, it's no great tragedy, and there's no dignity in worrying about it"). Those who stick with it will be dazzled.
