Writer Sheila Heti (Pure Colour; Motherhood) offers an experimental meditation on the self's development over time in her auto-fictional Alphabetical Diaries. Ten years ago, Heti returned to the diaries she'd kept for more than a decade. Meticulously recording each sentence from the diaries into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet and then alphabetizing them, she began looking for patterns, breakages, and touch points in her documentation of her own life.
The result is a book consisting of chapters organized by letter, an alphabetized list of her diary sentences no longer structured by time or narrative. Heti's alphabetized diary sentences originally were published as a 10-installment newsletter by the New York Times, but find new resonance in this novel-esque form. Readers can't help but search for narrative meaning in a book divided into chapters. But when such a throughline is elusive, other ways of understanding, organizing, and processing the fleeting and seemingly everyday moments of the writer-narrator's life surface.
While people and specific events figure prominently in these sentences, without context, the emotive nature of Heti's precise language takes center stage. In lines like "I want to tear him apart with my teeth and feel his blood all over my mouth," readers are thrown into the stark reality of feelings made flesh. These sentences offer a raw, near-relentless encounter with the intimate ways the narrator experiences herself. And while the book offers more questions about that self than it does answers, it also carves out space for readers, too, to pause with what kinds of feelings, desires, and thoughts might inform their own lives. --Alice Martin, freelance writer and editor