The ABCS of modern life, according to Sheila Heti
“No one at this point in history knows how to live, so we read biographies and memoirs, hoping to get some clues,” Sheila Heti writes in “Alphabetical Diaries,” her powerful and intimate new book. That is why we read novels, too, of course — for the clues. Heti knows this. It is why her breakout 2010 novel had an exemplary title, one that could stand in for the title of every real novel from “Don Quixote” down the line: “How Should a Person Be?”
Well, how should we be? In “Alphabetical Diaries,” Heti comes at this question slant, as Emily Dickinson advised truth tellers to do — so slant that you may feel you are in a ship that has been thrown sideways. The book is made up of Heti’s frank, funny, filthy and casually philosophical diaries, 10 years of them. She has pared them down and arranged the sentences in order from A to Z, so that a typical portion reads:
Stop doing the column. Stop doing university gigs. Stop going onstage, traveling, all of it. Stop googling yourself. Stop reading the reviews. Stop spending money. Stop talking to anyone, everyone, about your new projects — just be quiet and think.
This is a conceit that would expose a lesser writer. He or she would be left naked, artistically, once the narrative tide had gone out. Heti’s voice, on the other hand, is rendered clearer and more electric. A switch has been flipped: She’s not in stereo — suddenly, she’s in mono. The effect is riveting. Every notion is packed tight. The reader stands amid a landslide of verbiage that more resembles poetry — all that anaphora ( repetition) and all those layered fricatives ( breathy consonants such as “f” and “th”), which, poet Rae Armantrout wrote in her 2022 collection, “Finalists,” tend to remind her of sex.
Heti is known for the clarity and ardor of her sex writing. The reader of “Alphabetical Diaries” will not be disappointed in this regard. Christopher Hitchens once wrote that Martis Amis had done “the really hard thinking” about a certain sex act. Heti has done the really hard thinking about submission and its opposite. One four- letter word is zealously deployed in this book, and that word is not “love.”
Heti is suspicious of reaching for a shelf- stable life: a husband and children. She comes to look at these things, but not to buy. Her feelings about men ( she also writes about sleeping with women) are in constant flux. She writes, “A man who could physically kill me in under a minute is a man who is easy to sleep beside.” And, “I want to tear him apart with my teeth and feel his blood all over my mouth.”
She delights in schoolgirl crushes. She’s good on the way others can toss little bombs into your soul: “Oh, look how beautiful he looks playing Scrabble! Oh, my beautiful man.” But in the next moment she longs to “starve or asphyxiate the part of my brain that thinks about men.” In one entry, she gets a bad haircut, and men stop noticing her on the street. To combat this lack of attention, at a friend’s advice, she begins wearing lipstick. At other times, she wants to douse her vanity with a can of hornet spray. Here, she is in league with Jean Rhys, who called the thirst to be beautiful and desired “the real curse of Eve.”
Many of this book’s exhortations are about making art. (“To write one thing that is honest instead of a pack of lies well said”; “I have to move away from, not towards, the dazzle”; “Give the reader everything.”) But it covers wide ground. It’s about money and friendship and families and parents and toothpaste and travel and Bob Dylan. It’s about trying to find a practical grasp on life. Its density makes you slow down as a reader. Your eyes snake down the page.
This book’s primary tension is between her longing for a larger life, perhaps in New York City, and her even stronger longing to be at her desk back home in Toronto, in discreet exile. She is the kind of loner who sometimes despises being alone.
This book’s concerns are also the concerns of her earlier novels, notably “Motherhood” and “How Should a Person Be?” There is a sense that she is waving goodbye to some of this material.
I found reading “Alphabetical Diaries” to be a profound experience, perhaps even more so than her novels. But then, I am the kind of reader who would trade 20 of William Shakespeare’s lesser plays for a memoir from him and three of Jane Austen’s six novels for one from her. There is something of Anaïs Nin’s journals in “Alphabetical Diaries,” and of Iris Murdoch’s letters, and of Edna O’brien’s memoirs. Something locked- in and bristling. Heti is wrestling openly with the things that matter.
I liked the way this book’s format stripped her prose, and her concerns, down to the DNA. Heti has written a small classic; she has shot a lasting arrow into the hide of the memoir form. While reading, I began to dream about finding someone to arrange some of my favorite books — “Moby- Dick,” perhaps, or “Rabbit Redux,” or the criticism of Pauline Kael and Lester Bangs, or Paul Fussell’s history of World War I, or Rita Dove’s poetry or Ralph Ellison’s letters — in this fashion, as an estranging treat, as a way to come at beloved language in a new way. Anti- concordances, of a sort.
Maybe this book is simply a fresh and unusual way of organizing one’s unhappiness. But as William Faulkner put it, in a 1950 letter, only vegetables are happy.