Sentences from a diary sorted alphabetically
ALPHABETICAL DIARIES SHEILA HETI 168pp. Fitzcarraldo Editions. Paperback, £10.99.
AFTER READING Sheila Heti’s most famous novel, How Should a Person Be?, in 2012, I proceeded immediately to the other books she had published and have since read each new one, excepting those for children, as soon as I could. That makes one short story collection, four novels, one collaborative self-help book, one co-edited anthology and one visit to Toronto in the freezing winter of 2015, when my husband and I flew from Chicago to see a production of Heti’s play, All Our Happy Days Are Stupid, in her home town. If you had asked me what I would feel after reading Alphabetical Diaries, her most recent book, I would not have predicted ambivalence. But ambivalence overwhelmed me after I read the last page and walked outside, into a milder winter, to get groceries for dinner.
Alphabetical Diaries includes 12 per cent of what Heti wrote in her diaries over a decade spanning her twenties and thirties. At some point she put the original half a million words into Microsoft Excel, sorted the sentences alphabetically, then spent more than a decade pruning them. There is a chapter for each letter (except X). Chapter I includes: “I am still young, twenty-eight ... I am thirty-one, after all. I am thirty-two”. This progression, over the course of a page, is one of the only times it’s clear when the sentences were written. (Heti is now forty-seven.) Time otherwise goes unmarked. Even when events seem consecutive there is no way of knowing whether they were: “Dad was upset today when the nurse said that what he needed was calories. Dad went home from the hospital today”. Maybe these sentences were written in the same hour, or maybe they are about different hospitals. The narrative flexibility is freeing, putting into practice the idea that a life story can be variously reinterpreted and rearranged.
Alphabetical rearrangement, it turns out, foregrounds the constant repetition and frequent opposition of thoughts in a person’s head over time. A repetition, from chapter V: “Vig is intelligent and interesting and funny. Vig is intelligent, loving and kind”. An opposition, from chapter C: “Claire is a great artist … Claire is an entertainer and a politician, but she is not actually an artist”. The deeper into the alphabet you go, the more the oppositions become repetitions themselves. Many times Heti is happy with her quiet life in Toronto, and many other times she feels stuck there. She frequently obsesses about her relationships with men, and frequently thinks she shouldn’t do that. It is this fluctuation that gives the book its shape, not a narrative arc but a continual back-and-forth, the tick-tock of a literary Newton’s cradle.
The reshaping of language through recontextualization is a common feature of writing
