Eli Osei
The Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, 224 pp., $27
The Alphabetical Diaries disappears as soon as you close it. It is a sprawling confessional: ten years of its writer’s life stripped of its context, cut into parts, rearranged by the sentence, permitted to run, through the chaos and crises, the pains and joys, the problems with money and problems with men, the heartbreaks and headaches of Sheila Heti’s life. It pulls you through personal sentences and fragmentary sentences, sentences devoid of sense and sentences full of mundanity. It pulls you through sentences that land with a bang. But when you hit the wall of the book’s back cover, and think about the words you’ve moved through, they vanish before you have a chance to say thanks. They dissolve into vague feelings and embarrassing paraphrases. They are lost to the days when Heti’s diaries were yours. Because when you give it some thought, you begin to realize that there were no real characters to hold onto; that the book comprised snippets of people’s lives and slits of Heti’s mind without establishing the world around them; that it collapsed time, place, and person, all in the name of form. It’s a book written by a human, but rewritten by language. It is organized on the principle that A follows B and B follows C. In it, the reader loses out on classic arcs and tangible takeaways, but they gain a reading experience like no other.
Sheila Heti is a writer’s writer. Her work reimagines the bounds of form. Her sophomore novel, How Should a Person be, grew out of a series of taped conversations between her and a friend. It is part transcript, part novel; it explores nonfiction’s fiction. The Alphabetical Diaries is similarly experimental. For ten years, Heti kept a diary, then she plugged the sentences into excel, arranged them into alphabetical order, and cut them down until she had something resembling a novel. She began with 500 000 words and ended with 50 000. These 50 000 words follow an ever-changing Heti, and her shifting feelings towards writing, wealth, and love. We read about her working on a novel (How Should a Person Be?) and then a story and then a novel; worrying about payment and then rent and then luxuries; dealing with Pavel, then Lars, then Vig. Various patterns emerge. Often, she is concerned with the impact of her writing; the story that comes out is not the one she wanted to write. Mostly, money is a problem; it hangs over her head and stifles her creativity. Always, men are difficult. She loves them too much. She loves them too little. She can’t understand her love and it begins to affect her work. She feels inferior to them. She feels superior to them. She feels like the weight of love will crush her someday, and she says this as it is.
As a form, the diary rests upon confessions. Unlike a novel, it is written for an audience of one. It is a soundboard for she with the need to be heard, a space where one can take one’s particular view of the world and give it shape, meaning, permanence, without worrying about critique. Heti’s book is raw, bristling with emotion, but honest throughout. It is a look into her quiet crises. It goes to places we are yet to go; places authors are afraid to bring their readers; places one wonders if Heti has brought even her friends. We receive vivid retellings of her sex life before learning that she “loathes her attraction to men.” We read of others berating her and then read of her doing it back. The book is full of her contradictions, her faults, her fears, the questions that make sleep futile, and none of this drives us away. If anything, Heti’s diaries’ illuminating of her flaws endears the reader to her. The book’s candor makes the great struggles easy to empathize with because it refuses to dress them up.
Between the moments of high intellect and reflection, we are given lowbrow details of the author's life. Heti speaks of everything from her dreams to her dinners, weaving them between sentences about her despair. This equalization of material is a function of the diary. It is a space for everything, existing beyond hierarchy, and so when the heavy hits arrive, they strike with great force. A punch between tickles has greater effect than a punch after two more. A passage like, “Dad’s wrists were so skinny, thin, and weak, and he said it was because the platelets were gone from all his operations. Dante’s Inferno. Dating is terrible. Daydreaming is like this…” lands harder than most intentional paragraphs about pain could.
Heti’s name is on the book, but language is making the calls. Most writers would consider the repeated use of anaphora to be overbearing, repetitious, sentimental, cheap. They would say it leads to lazy writing. They would say it constricts the creative mind. But The Alphabet, Heti’s ghost writer, doesn't care. It lives on anaphora, running at a pace that feels like it must have been constructed, because the sentences hit you, one after another as if there’s no way of shutting them out. This has to do with repetition’s natural rhythm. When each of a book’s first sentences begin with, “A book,” you read the first two with amusement, and set into a rhythm on the third, flying past four and five, before almost glossing over the refrain in sentence six. The Alphabetical Diaries is two-hundred pages of freefalling. Once you begin, you cannot stop. The language will not let you.
And there’s something magical about this. One feels more willing to give oneself to epiphanies which come out of chance than epiphanies which are constructed to be epiphanies. Take this excerpt from Chapter B: “Best not to get too rosy-eyed about each other, so that when I return to him, we aren’t disappointed. Best not to live too emotionally in the future—it hardly ever comes to pass. Better to be outside, where you have always been, all your life, even in school, nothing changes. Better to look outward than inward. Blow jobs and tenderness. Books that fall in between the cracks…” Its power lies not only in a narrative emerging from the reordering, but also in the chaos that remained. We trust the logic behind Best not to live emotionally in the future because we see how it relates to him. We sit with the thought because it doesn’t feel forced, because it sits next to Blow jobs and tenderness.
“It is one in the morning. It is now the middle of the night. It is now three a.m. It is one of the tricks of art.” The moment you buy into the language’s control, it consumes you. The book turns time into a rope and wraps you up with it. “I am thirty-one, after all. I am thirty-two.” Everything happens at once. At any point, you could be anywhere in the ten-year journey of Heti’s diaries, and in a way that means that time has disappeared. “I am in Istanbul. I am in New York. I am in Paris with nothing to do…” place follows time. “I am so happy today. I am so sick of myself and all my thoughts, circles, fears, and worries. I am so tired I want to die.” The self follows place— through the contradictions, into the nothing.
A little while ago, a friend told me about a restricted version of English called E-prime. It excludes all forms of the verb “to be.” No be, no being, no been. No am, no is, no are. Was, wasn’t, weren’t—all gone. The idea being that no person is any of the things they do or feel. I am not a student. But five days a week I come to classes at an institution for higher education. I am not depressed. But existential malaise and my ongoing battle with the self make most days sour. Before The Alphabetical Diaries, I thought that if a person was not any one thing, they must be nothing. But within Heti’s abundant nothing lies everything. Her book holds a radical acceptance that exists beyond E-prime, recognising that a single “to be” sentence is not enough to contain a person, and instead of shying away from that, it includes as many of them as it takes to get closer to the truth.
“I am sad. I am scared. I am sick of this going nowhere, these games. I am sick of this wondering, this guessing, this uncertainty and instability. I am sincere with him, I guess. I am single now. I am sitting at my little table. I am sitting here in a light blue dress, the dress I bought yesterday at Kensington Market. I am sitting in bed feeling nothing. I am sitting outside in the blue hammock. I am so happy I will be seeing Lars in two days! I am so happy I’m going to be seeing him in New York. I am so happy the book is done.”
I am somewhat unsure if the life I have chosen to live is the life that is mine, but I am going to live it, and I am going to love it; I am going to give it my all because at the end of the day all of this, all of the hurt and the heartbreak, the desire and the disease, the mortal afflictions and inconsistencies I fall victim to, and scorn myself for, are not to be dismissed, written off, labeled nothing, for they are the substance of life, all I have, for they are Heti, me, and all that stands in between. I am soon to accept this.
A diary is a world, and within it all is one. The I is Heti. The you is Heti. She writes for herself and to herself. She is the reader and the writer. When we pick up the book, we become her. Her worries become ours and we immediately understand them. Her loves become ours and feel them deeply. When she asks, “what beauty can come of this randomness,” we answer: a life, obscured and reconstructed, and yet on full display.
There’s a Martin Amis interview where, when asked what he means to say with a novel, he replies, “the novel, all four hundred and seventy five pages of it. Not a catchphrase that you can print on a badge.” And while The Alphabetical Diaries is full of stomach-tugging lines, any diminishing of the book’s scale instantly sucks the life out of it. A line is not a book. A paragraph cannot hold Heti. As the alphabet runs out and the pages dwindle, a feeling of completeness begins to emerge, a secret arises, and you grab it with eagerness—the book finishes, but it leaves you with the world. Heti says that she wants to write a book that “talks about the beauty of the world and what is great about being alive.” If this review disappears when you put it down, pick up her diaries and try to find out.
Eli Osei feels that if we all sat down and thought about what we believed in, the world would be a better place. He’s sad we haven’t found time to do so.