Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Digressions notwithstanding, conventional plots in fiction progress from A to B. Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries is anything but conventional, as each of its chapters proceeds according to the letters of the alphabet, thereby foregrounding its literary process. Instead of any chronological diary entry, Heti begins with A: “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 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, way more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding.” Through a kaleidoscope, Heti examines the writing life and love life of her speaker who has a series of overlapping relationships with lovers who interfere with her work. Temporality within a story gives way to the physicality of “thing” and book.

“Through a kaleidoscope, Heti examines the writing life and love life of her speaker who has a series of overlapping relationships with lovers who interfere with her work.”

The a to b of “A book” launches Heti’s diaries that bind her to her friends and readers. “Alphabetical” appears on the cover as a diagonal, which may be the appropriate slant for reading these diaries. That is, the reader should position herself between the inside of Heti’s headspace and beside her head — observing obliquely whatever transpires in her amorous alphabet. Heti establishes a rhythm in her alphabetical sentences, but no sooner does the reader settle into that rhythm than Heti surprises us by dropping a letter from a particular word. Thus, fiction appears as “fi tion,” and this sudden disappearance of the letter serves as a kind of Brechtian alienation technique to make the reader aware of the fictive process. This linguistic and narrative frame-breaking works in conjunction with the breaking of fraught relationships in the narrator’s love life in Paris, New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles.

Pavel, Lars, Lemons, and other lovers come and go randomly so that, just as plot disappears, so too does character development. Lovers and letters are not entirely interchangeable. The diarist’s reading life is also significant: in the “A” entry she reads Jane Austen’s Emma, while her final chapter is devoted to Zadie Smith. Heti also reads Cormac McCarthy and Clarice Lispector: her writing is closer to the latter’s hermetic inner world of strange creation and speculation.

The “D” chapter begins with her father: “Dad read an earlier draft and had some suggestions about how to make it more real, but I don’t think I want it to be too real.” She then moves to Dante’s Inferno and “Don’t forget that although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is to lead the reader through an experience.” And we are led through Heti’s experiences and experiments until “Don’t pull the reader along.” She hopscotches before landing on: “Don’t think in terms of great art or great artist; think in terms of the work.” Word and work are both the process and the finished product, which carries on according to its own moment and momentum.

On to E: “Enough of the book is invented, isn’t it? Enough of this. Enough.” The word cut short through editing and irony. Skip to G: “Give the reader everything, which is the opposite of the modernist thing of expecting the reader to put it all together, to fill in the gaps,” Playing mindful games with her reader and her self, she gives and is forgiven on her way to H: “How do you express both things in literature: that there is a person, and that the person is dressed up as a character?” Her how-to turns to the longest chapter “I” where she examines the ego’s angles.

Her self-inspection is introspective: “I am growing sick of being in my head …. I am going to think about thoughts…. I am looking forward to writing about the beauty and the rhythm of sentences… and taking the conventions for granted…. I know this cannot be interesting to read.” Her referential self reaches out to earlier writers: “I never met Kafka, yet I feel like I have.” Kafka’s enigmatic diaries serve as another model for Alphabetical Diaries. I also stands for improvisation in the scrambling of sentences: “If this book is any good, it will be because of a concentration of mental energy, even in times when you didn’t know where you were going.” And “It all has to be worked out in the fi tion.”

In the dialectical diary between self and world, I turns it: “It is a question of metabolism, writing, of being able to sit in one place for six or seven hours….It is clear that I have spent three years thinking about myself.” Kierkegaard, Montaigne, and Vonnegut also insinuate themselves into Heti’s alphabet, along with her lovers: “it wasn’t as though the thought of him was in my head, but rather that my head was in the thought of him; the thought of him was bigger than my head.” This rhythmic interplay between mind and body informs her diaries to the end of J: “Just don’t think about it. Just kidding.”

L introduces a list of imperatives that hold laissez faire in check: “Let the books gallivant in the warmth of Spain, while you stay at your desk, writing. Let the novelists write the novels. Let the work be your only voice.” R is for reading and remembrance of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Brecht: “Remember reading the Brecht diaries? Remember that each chapter must deliver some narrative or suspense satisfactions, so that things change from beginning to end, leading the reader forward so that they will want to finish the book.” Beckett joins Brecht and Borges in a parodic parade: “What century am I living in that I have to pay my debts to modernism? What did Beckett know?… what beauty could be made from all this randomness?”

The longest sentence in the book appears near the end of W. It begins with “Write the book that” and ends a page later with “write the book that this person would choose,” and in between are all the letters of love. Altering ego, this ABC of writing embodies postmodernism’s takes on modernism. From A to Z Heti’s highwire act balances precariously along an electric current that snaps and dazzles consciousness into being.

SHEILA HETI is the author of ten books, including the novels Pure Colour, which won the Governor General’s Literary Prize for Fiction, Motherhood, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the “New Classics” of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the “New Vanguard” by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018, and Pure Colour as a top book of 2022. Her work has been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto and Kawartha Lakes, Ontario.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Canada (Feb. 6 2024)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 103900749X
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1039007499

Michael Greenstein

Poetry Editor

Michael Greenstein is a retired professor of English at the Université de Sherbrooke. He is the author of Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature and has published widely on Victorian, Canadian, and American-Jewish literature.