Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti review – a radical fusion of linguistic experiment and philosophical inquiry | Autobiography and memoir

Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character and the boundaries between fiction and memoir.

Both lines of investigation are furthered in this latest work, her most radical yet. It began when she decided to upload 10 years of her journal writing – 500,000 words in all – to an Excel spreadsheet, which ordered her sentences alphabetically. Then came the editing, a task she’s worked at, on and off, for more than a decade, winnowing the sentences so that only those she liked best remained.

Alphabetical Diaries takes the reader from A (“A book”) to Z (“Zadie Smith’s husband”) in 25 chapters (she wrote no sentences beginning with an X). Some stretch across many pages – I being by far the longest – while others, such as Q, consist of a single entry: “Quiet days, not seeing people, feeling fine.” In the entire book, there’s not a single paragraph break.

With context and chronology stripped away, an index’s methodical anarchy rules. “When he calls, what will I do? When I live according to ethics, I don’t feel I’m living honestly. When I looked at the wall, I saw a second moth like the first, its white wings soft and laced with dust” – so runs a typical string of sentences.

Even so, the frisson derived from accessing another’s most intimate scribblings remains, as Heti unselfconsciously shares doubts and desires, regrets, ambitions and jealousies. She questions herself relentlessly – as an observer, a lover, a writer. She travels, yearning always for New York but also spending time in London, Paris, Berlin. She craves company but savours solitariness. She’s gossipy, lusting, vain. Throughout, creativity and – often to her own dismay – her appetite for men vie for her attention, but she also spends a fair amount of time tidying up, shopping, worrying about money.

It’s a text best consumed in long sittings in order for its echoes and serendipities to register, but it’s exciting, too, to be reminded of just how much narrative oomph can be packed into that most basic building block of prose – the sentence. Consider the storytelling potential of this, for instance: “I put the teeth in my pocket.”

Intriguing in theory, Heti’s structure can of course be off-putting and frustrating in practice. What helps is the energy that the text draws from the tension between the unfiltered nature of its raw material and the artfulness of its paring down. Chapter endings, in particular, feel full of crafty intent and she pays acute attention to rhythm throughout. Her editing sometimes creates sequences that seem to flow, acquiring unintended meaning, along with juxtapositions that can be comic or poetic, sometimes aphoristic. Hence, “Marriage can make misery more bearable” is followed immediately by the gloomily droll: “Marriage is one step closer to divorce than being in a relationship.”

Across Heti’s work, the intensity of her intellectual seriousness is matched by playfulness, and this abecedarian assemblage is no exception. As she threads her way through the alphabet, she repeatedly appears to pre-empt every conceivable response to the book. “What a load of rubbish all this writing is,” she says towards its close, a short while later asking: “What beauty could be made from this randomness?”

Much beauty, is the answer, and not just that either. In embracing life’s randomness and so thoroughly disrupting the urge to impose, through prose, order and a sense of the evolving self, she ultimately reveals just how solid our innate characteristics areand how irrepressible narrative can be.

Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character and the boundaries between fiction and memoir.

Both lines of investigation are furthered in this latest work, her most radical yet. It began when she decided to upload 10 years of her journal writing – 500,000 words in all – to an Excel spreadsheet, which ordered her sentences alphabetically. Then came the editing, a task she’s worked at, on and off, for more than a decade, winnowing the sentences so that only those she liked best remained.

Alphabetical Diaries takes the reader from A (“A book”) to Z (“Zadie Smith’s husband”) in 25 chapters (she wrote no sentences beginning with an X). Some stretch across many pages – I being by far the longest – while others, such as Q, consist of a single entry: “Quiet days, not seeing people, feeling fine.” In the entire book, there’s not a single paragraph break.

With context and chronology stripped away, an index’s methodical anarchy rules. “When he calls, what will I do? When I live according to ethics, I don’t feel I’m living honestly. When I looked at the wall, I saw a second moth like the first, its white wings soft and laced with dust” – so runs a typical string of sentences.

Even so, the frisson derived from accessing another’s most intimate scribblings remains, as Heti unselfconsciously shares doubts and desires, regrets, ambitions and jealousies. She questions herself relentlessly – as an observer, a lover, a writer. She travels, yearning always for New York but also spending time in London, Paris, Berlin. She craves company but savours solitariness. She’s gossipy, lusting, vain. Throughout, creativity and – often to her own dismay – her appetite for men vie for her attention, but she also spends a fair amount of time tidying up, shopping, worrying about money.

It’s a text best consumed in long sittings in order for its echoes and serendipities to register, but it’s exciting, too, to be reminded of just how much narrative oomph can be packed into that most basic building block of prose – the sentence. Consider the storytelling potential of this, for instance: “I put the teeth in my pocket.”

Intriguing in theory, Heti’s structure can of course be off-putting and frustrating in practice. What helps is the energy that the text draws from the tension between the unfiltered nature of its raw material and the artfulness of its paring down. Chapter endings, in particular, feel full of crafty intent and she pays acute attention to rhythm throughout. Her editing sometimes creates sequences that seem to flow, acquiring unintended meaning, along with juxtapositions that can be comic or poetic, sometimes aphoristic. Hence, “Marriage can make misery more bearable” is followed immediately by the gloomily droll: “Marriage is one step closer to divorce than being in a relationship.”

Across Heti’s work, the intensity of her intellectual seriousness is matched by playfulness, and this abecedarian assemblage is no exception. As she threads her way through the alphabet, she repeatedly appears to pre-empt every conceivable response to the book. “What a load of rubbish all this writing is,” she says towards its close, a short while later asking: “What beauty could be made from this randomness?”

Much beauty, is the answer, and not just that either. In embracing life’s randomness and so thoroughly disrupting the urge to impose, through prose, order and a sense of the evolving self, she ultimately reveals just how solid our innate characteristics areand how irrepressible narrative can be.