Alphabetical Diaries

December 1, 2023
An acclaimed novelist shares her thoughts from A to Z. Heti, known for her experimental literary works, including Motherhood and Pure Colour, presents a collection of sentences from 10 years' worth of diary entries, divided into alphabetized chapters. The result is a curiously disjunctive narrative that nevertheless reveals distinct patterns. By persevering through what must initially seem like an inventory of random statements, readers will become familiar with a set of thematic preoccupations: anxieties about professional success, churning erotic aspirations and frustrations, self-deprecating confessions masking self-regard. Heti provides some genuine fun in her invitation to discover more conventional coherence by reconstructing a chronological version of events. Most amusing is the revelation within the alphabetic jumble of the consistent dynamics of the author's romantic relationships. A sentence in chapter C--"Cause I really have been thinking about it and realizing that this is what I always do: move in with someone and almost instantly get depressed. Cause I'll leave. Cause I'm selfish"--encourages us to consider distant sentences from this and other chapters in order to understand a broader context. Other attempts at sense-making are teasingly thwarted, since abstract ideas that require more than a single sentence to become coherent resist our understanding: "I thought that humans, on the whole, were not so great, not as great as they're made out to be." Intriguingly, an original form of self-exposure emerges as we see some of the author's verbal habits laid bare. Seeing a very long series of sentences beginning "Of course," for instance, produces a memorable sense of character revelation. One may question, perhaps, whether the rewards of this book justify its demands, since what we can glean of Heti's inner life finally seems rather prosaic, no matter the innovative arrangement of its expression. An unusual and sometimes humorous arrangement of self-reflections.

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January 8, 2024
In this arresting literary experiment, Canadian novelist and playwright Heti (Pure Colour) takes sentences from 10 years of her personal journal entries and rearranges them in alphabetical order. “Don’t forget that although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead readers through an experience,” Heti writes, providing a kind of cipher for the idiosyncratic format. What the book lacks in traditional narrative structure, Heti supplements with evocative snapshots of life, detailing broken love affairs, mediocre meals, and professional triumphs with the controlled chaos of a late-night thought spiral. She juxtaposes the mundane (“My book will be done this year!”) and the profound (“I wonder if I wanted to be a writer because nobody ever told me the truth”). The arcs of friendships and romantic relationships are sliced up and remixed, raising subtextual questions about the linearity of time and the nature of change. While the format might grate in lesser hands, and certain sections (the lengthy “I”s in particular) will test the endurance of even the most forgiving readers, Heti’s penchant for aphorism and sentence-level excellence keep things afloat (“Don’t want to be killed, but if I am, it’s no great tragedy, and there’s no dignity in worrying about it”). Those who stick with it will be dazzled. Agent: Jim Rutman, Sterling Lord Literary.

January 1, 2024
Playful yet disciplined, Heti's (Pure Colour, 2022) latest book is an experiment in literature. The concept is simple: Heti took the personal thoughts she recorded over a ten-year period and put each sentence in alphabetical order. Lovers, friendships, places of residence, psychological woes: all are cut and shuffled, removed from context, and woven into a narrative that cannot be made linear again. Readers are left to analyze the patterns that emerge in Heti's thinking and to try to make sense of them alongside her. It feels like she's recollecting every part of her life all at once. And as an award-winning autofiction writer, she knows how to engage the mundane details of life with curiosity and thoughtfulness. Devout readers of the New York Times may recognize certain passages; the newspaper ran an earlier version of the book as a multi-issue newsletter in 2022. This will be a particularly suitable offering for readers who enjoy the intimacy of memoir but wish to delve into more experimental work.

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