Author of the week

Sheila Heti

Novelist Sheila Heti must be allergic to convention, said Amanda Paige Inman in Nylon. In her new book, Alphabetical Diaries, the rule-busting author of How Should a Person Be? fills every page with entries she wrote in her journal across 10 years. But rather than present her observations chronologically, she imported all 500,000 words into Excel to create a spreadsheet that organized the sentences alphabetically. The result, she hoped, would provide her an understanding of herself removed from the specific circumstances that prompted each entry. “How many times had I written, ‘I hate him,’ for example?” she asks. Before publishing, Heti radically trimmed down the full document. “Without editing, it would’ve been too boring,” she says. Even then, though, she felt exposed. “I was still afraid to have people read it, honestly,” she says. “When I gave it to the people close to me to read, I hoped they would still like me.”

Inescapably, Alphabetical Diaries is lopsided in telling ways, said William Earl in Variety. “I had something for every letter except for X,” says Heti, and “a lot of diary sentences start with an I.” But reshuffling her concerns about life, work, and relationships revealed to her how she has and hasn’t changed. “Change is real, but it’s not the kind of change you imagine where you become this wholly different person,” she says. Compiling the book also taught her about priorities she never realized she had. Her favorite entry, she says, is the single sentence that begins with the letter Q: “Quiet days not seeing people, feeling fine.” Having more days like that is “kind of an ambition,” she says. “All three things together just seem so beautiful.”