As evidenced in her breakout How Should a Person Be and 2022’s Pure Color, Sheila Heti writes books that explode the boundaries between nonfiction and fiction. Alphabetical Diaries is a compellingly weird new experiment, this time in diary-keeping. Creating a nonlinear timeline, Heti organizes the sentences of 10 years of her journals alphabetically by the first letter of each sentence.
Given the constraints of the alphabetical form, the book nonetheless forms a coherent narrative with recurring themes: writing, money, sex, clothes and conversations with friends. Heti’s ambition and intelligence weave through many of these entries as she balances a desire for the peace necessary for writing with the restlessness of her desire for sex, love and travel. Just because her diary entries are nonlinear doesn’t mean they don’t tell a profoundly personal story about a glamorous young writer. Knowing this going in, the reader can relax and enjoy the ride.
Daring and revealing, Alphabetical Diaries, which was first published in part in the New York Times, will appeal to anyone who has ever kept a diary and wondered “Why am I writing about the same things, again and again?” Each of Heti’s relationships, for example, repeats the patterns of the past. Her lovers and friends appear and reappear, as the reader gradually pieces together Heti’s intense relationships.
Lots of writers’ diaries are fascinating because they reveal the underside of the published books: the work and doubt and insecurity the writer faces from conception to publication. Alphabetical Diaries has put a glorious twist on the genre, highlighting a more circular and repetitive logic to diaristic writing. Only Heti could have written this book, the latest in an oeuvre that is marked by increasingly profound experiments in language and storytelling. Personal and profane, quietly and radically subversive, this unusual version of a writer’s diary offers readers an often-comic glimpse into experiments in prose.
