‘Portrait of person’ presented in Heti’s ‘Alphabetical Diaries’
Sheila Heti, the author of “Motherhood,” “Pure Colour” and “How Should a Person Be?,” created her new book, “Alphabetical Diaries,” by extracting lines from 10 years of her diaries and arranging them in alphabetical — rather than chronological or contextual — order to create a unique and compelling reading experience.
“It really did take me a decade to figure out,” she says. “I started to see that, with certain kinds of edits, I was starting to create a world the same way there is one in a novel.
“I was able to see this as a separate fictional world in which a person is living and thinking and moving rather than earlier in the process when it just felt like it was my diaries.”
So is it a novel or a diary or memoir? “At one point, I wanted to call it a memoir, but I think it’s closest to a novel because I don’t feel like it’s confessional,” she says. “I feel like it’s a portrait of a person.”
This interview with Heti has been edited for clarity and length.
Q: Why did you decide to alphabetize your diary? A:
I don’t know honestly, I just remember one day I was putting the sentences into Excel and alphabetizing them. I can come up with all sorts of reasons after the fact, but I honestly don’t know what the spark of that idea was.
Q: These are actual diary entries. Were you thinking, I have all this writing already — maybe I could put it to use? A:
Yeah, I’d just finished “How Should a Person Be?,” and it was such a huge project — like seven years writing — that I knew it was going to be By Sheila Heti; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 224 pages, $27.
a long time before I had anything else to work on, before I had a lot of material to edit, which is my favorite part of the process. It was like, “I have a lot of writing; maybe I can just start working,” because I like working and I suddenly had nothing to work on. So I think I was like, “Here’s this archive — what happens if I start playing with it?”
Q: The people and names you mention are fictionalized? A:
I didn’t write any (new) sentences, but I made composite characters out of the sentences ... they were like archetypes of the people that I did encounter over the 10 years. But nobody who was in my life would be able to track any of the characters because they are recombined from sentences about lots of different people turned into one character.
Q: One of the compelling elements of “Alphabetical Diaries” is that the reader starts to build a narrative out of all of these lines. A:
I come from theater. To me, it’s like theater — the audience and the actors, all in a room together, make something. That’s what I think I always want to keep from the world of the theater that I love so much — you make something in tandem with other people who are there with you in the present. Books are less like that. But there’s a way I’m trying to, I think, make books like that, where you feel like you’re creating a moment with the reader rather than just, “Well, here’s the thing I created and now you can experience it.”
Q: Were there things you left in that you weren’t sure whether you wanted to? A:
I really had to resist that impulse. There were a lot of things where I felt embarrassed. And I just thought, well, you have to have a better reason for cutting it than that. There’s a kind of discipline in it, like, it’s just a sentence, you know?
Q: I read the book, and I also listened to the audiobook read by Kate Berlant. How did she come to narrate the book? A:
Kate’s a friend of mine, and I just thought she’d be perfect. I saw her onewoman show in New York. I love her voice. She’s so intelligent. I just felt like she would just bring the perfect sensibility to it. And she absolutely did. I showed her a draft of it years ago. So she’s also known about the project for a very long time, which is fun. It’s kind of like a one-woman show or something listening to it.
Q: There are some tough moments when you describe some questionable behavior directed at you. While it could be upsetting, it’s also interesting that you chose to include these moments.
A: Yeah, you always get the last word as a writer.