Sheila Heti's 'Alphabetical Diaries'

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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, since a book is kept together by its binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections.

Thus open’s Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries, with ideas about its own identity. If you pick it up casually in a bookshop without attending to its title, it may be a little while before you notice the form: all the sentences are in alphabetical order, from the A section (more starters: A bunch of us … / A bus came …. / A certain kind of bore … / A commitment to the relationship …) to the amusingly brief Z page, with its one entry starting Zadie Smith’s husband…  Not surprisingly, there’s no X section.

So this is a book apparently randomly ‘ordered’, though in fact it is artfully shaped. Heti cut down 500,000 words in her diary to 50,000, after pasting the sentences into a massive spreadsheet and alphabetising them. Then came the selecting and editing, so her consciousness applied itself a second time to her writings, and who knows how much this second filtering shaped her own ‘kaleidoscope’. I suppose we don’t even know if she changed sentences, or created new ones. To what extent is this a novel rather than the ‘Essay’ category given to it by Fitzcarraldo Editions?

This approach could easily have been an irritating gimmick, and the book might indeed be a Marmite experience for many. But for me it was fascinating, moving and often funny. Most prominent are the many starting juxtapositions, which can be almost Dickinsonian. You never know when reading a sentence what is coming next, and the writing challenges the consciousness of readers who expect something that they can predict, something that fits into a linear mental narrative, the kinds of stories with which we try to make sense of our lives. Regularly you get a little jolt of the unexpected, the humorous, the poignant:

Got to the airport: they scanned the bags and checked through the luggage three times. Grandma died. Grandma has been sick. Grandma is ailing still. Grandma said that sex is the glue.

Sex is indeed one of the strongest strains in the book, appearing with tremendous erotic charge on many of the pages: the full gamut of emotional and physical relationships is here, woven into the texture of daily life. Lovers are ever-present: Pavel, Lars, Vig. Pavel heads every sentence in five or six consecutive pages, but then others also appear out of nowhere in single-sentence shards, enacting the ways some lovers can be part of our consciousness for ever, their significance never easily settled:

I am getting tired of writing this book. I am getting to the point where I feel like I’ve mapped the land. I am glad he is coming because I am growing sick of being in my head. I am glad he is out of town now.

I should not make this book sound earnest. It is often very funny. It is sly, nimble, light on its feet. Often there are extended bravura riffs built on starter phrases (I don’t want …/ Like a… / Not…). To get a proper sense of the effect, read the B chapter.

Above all, Alphabetical Diaries made me think, and I imagined my own version, should I have kept a diary. What shape would that take? What shape has my own life taken?