Alphabetical Diaries
Sheila Heti FITZCARRALDO
“I WAS SURE THAT when people saw my book they would say, ‘It’s even worse than I expected. Now one can really tell what she is like.’” A thousand years ago, Sei Shōnagon recounted her dread of exposure in The Pillow Book.
I thought of Shōnagon’s modern voice, her lists and anecdotes that follow no detectable order, when reading Sheila Heti’s fearless Alphabetical Diaries. By alphabetising and editing 500,000 words from a decade of diaries, Heti has restaged some enduring aspects of women’s experience. Like Shōnagon, she eschews chronology and exposition. Her book is driven instead by the fervid consciousness of a 30-something alter ego, and her friends, rivals and lovers. Piquant and forthright, the narrator recounts what Lars, Lemons, Vig, Pavel, Rosa and Fiona do and say to her. “Lars thought it might be best not to say what qualities he wanted in a woman. Lars touched my face in the cab. Lars wants to be with a regular girl who is not an artist, who will cook for him, he says … Lars was up in my mind from reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover, finishing it this morning around seven. Last night at the party I told him I had big news, and he suddenly turned red and asked me if I was pregnant.”
What should get excised from a diary before publication? John Cheever’s journals were once reviewed as “whiny, selfpitying, priapic, lugubrious, puerile, self-destructive, cruel, drunk”. Yet, for his son, the point of exposing Cheever’s confessional texts (posthumously) was to show others “that their thoughts were not unthinkable”. Heti’s frank vulnerability is refreshing in a world where irreproachable selves are increasingly curated online. Yet she also plays with the frisson of self-exposure. Her breakout autofiction How Should a Person Be? (2010) captured the uber-confessional style of her urban art-world milieu. This new work also comments on its narrative strategies: “Persona allows us to participate without, at every turn, risking everything we’ve got.”
With its ceaseless cogitating, its shifting between the existential and the quotidian, Alphabetical Diaries has the thrillingly unpredictable tenor of an overheard psychoanalysis. If her friends have mastered the knack of life – “Rosa pointed out that healthy people have healthy relationships. Rosa pointed out that I always feel anxious about every relationship right from the start. Rosa pointed out that my shirt was always somewhat unbuttoned. Rosa said I lacked courage in not sleeping with him or seducing him” – no one exhorts the narrator as much as herself. “Walk more and be outside more … Hand your book in and publish it, come what may … If you go into the deepest, most base feeling inside yourself, which is the fundamental feeling that doesn’t change, then you can start writing and continue writing from there …”
Heti calls Alphabetical Diaries “the self’s report on itself”, which sounds scholarly, even a little narky. But the act of alphabetising intimate and explicit events gives them an official gloss. This contained exposure reminds me of Valie Export’s feminist performances (see Touch Cinema, 1968) in which Export presented audiences with her framed genitals to counter the sexualised women onscreen. Containing private life in a public dossier answers back to a literary history in which women’s personal writing was relegated as minor.
Central to all Heti’s work is playful experimentation – her recent origin story “According to Alice” was composed with a chatbot. Her Diaries follow earlier literary experiments with constraint: Walter Abish’s Alphabetical Africa (1974) and W.H. Auden’s “sort of autobiography” A Certain World (1970), which arranged quotes in alphabetical categories. But its mode, 25 breakneck monologues without paragraph breaks, channels Thomas Bernhard, who chronicled the postwar Austrian psyche in breathless, manic diatribes.
Fittingly, the longest chapter falls under the letter “I”: “I never meet any of the interesting people there are to meet. I never met Kafka, yet I feel like I have … I protested that it’s not so easy to stop taking someone into consideration when you have been concerned about them for five whole years, but as I said this, I opened the door to the deli and saw the long salad bar halfway down the store, and all the ingredients in it, and its silver roof, and it felt possible to never think of him again … I finally said he looked like Rambo, and he said, Arthur Rimbaud?”
No chapter exists for “X”. Well, how often are X-rays and xylophones notable in a life? For the final chapter, there’s just one zingy sentence namechecking “Zadie Smith’s husband”.