Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries is more than what meets the eye

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• Title: Alphabetical Diaries
• Author: Sheila Heti
• Genre: Fiction
• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Pages: 224

In 2005 the provocative French writer Edouard Levé published Autoportrait, a novel consisting of seemingly random but true statements about himself. There is a barely tolerable banality to the project; Levé writes things such as, “I prefer lamps with lampshades to halogen lamps,” and, “I reuse grocery bags as trash bags.”

And yet, there is a kind of enduring magic at work with his execution of the conceit. The reader feels a special intimacy with the author, and not just on account of his more revealing confessions. “When I look at a strawberry, I think of a tongue,” he wrote. It’s been more than a decade since I first read Lorin Stein’s translation of Autoportrait, but even now, when I look at a strawberry, I think of Edouard Levé.

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While Autoportrait was written for an audience, Sheila Heti’s new book, Alphabetical Diaries, began without the end in mind. It was, as the title suggests, her personal diary. At a certain point, Heti compiled 10 years worth of entries or, as the jacket copy informs us, 500,000 words, into a spreadsheet and sorted the sentences alphabetically. She then edited the book to 60,000, which is roughly the average length of a novel. The intervention of Excel’s sorting function conceals and reveals a deeply human experience in equally tantalizing measure.

From the first sentence – “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain” – Heti’s diary seems to playfully propose a way to think about the book in your hand. Or maybe it promises to deliver something one might shelve as self-help, an examination of one human mind that may illuminate what it means to have a mind, more generally. What is going on in our brain?

Only later, after becoming accustomed to the way the text works – after learning how to read a diary where two consecutive sentences might bear no direct connection and, in fact, may have been written years apart from each other – can readers understand that perhaps that first sentence was about a book, but not necessarily this one. Maybe she was describing a book she read, or wanted to read. Maybe someone in her life was recommending Atomic Habits. There is no way to know.

Stripped of direct context, the diary exists without continuous scenes, narrative or plot. Without, that is to say, certainty or clarity. Instead, we have the rhythm of Heti’s life – her consciousness – set to an alphabetical meter. The method allows for some fantastic jokes: “It is now one in the morning. It is now the middle of the night. It is now three a.m. It is one of the tricks of art.”

Over all, the effect is profound. We see her fixations, her questions about life, love, writing and making a home in the world, weave in and out of her mind for a decade, with the constancy of the moon crossing the night sky. “What a boring life,” Heti writes, “to always be rehashing the same old things.”

Perhaps in life it may be tedious to have to learn the same lessons over and over, to find yourself constantly in a familiar pattern. But in Heti’s Diaries it’s hypnotically satisfying.

Of course, she is no stranger to exploiting the delightful discrepancy between life as it’s lived and as it’s written. In two of Heti’s previous books – Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? – the author created autofictions (... Autoportraits?) that were set at the fault lines of big questions in her actual life, and pointedly used real experiences to craft fictional environments for thinking through those questions.

In 2010′s How Should a Person Be? she recorded conversations with her friends and used them to populate her novel with real people – with a Sheila character and a Margaux character (after her close friend Margaux Williamson, the painter) and so on. In her latest, Heti assigns pseudonyms to most of the recurring characters, primarily friends and lovers. The contours of these relationships remain fuzzy, but it’s thrilling to feel how Heti’s depictions of certain characters, certain scenarios, threaten to cohere.

A friend Heti calls Claire comes through, over years and years, as a confident woman whose self-assurance simultaneously inspires and threatens. A lover called Pavel is less finely realized, because most of what we learn about him is through the smoky lens of Heti’s abject desire. The lovers in general feel interchangeable, though some sex acts are more memorable than others. What is specific here is the force of Heti’s yearning, how she finds herself regularly consumed with it, a pattern she begins to recognize and lament. “Thinking about lovers is a form of vanity,” she writes, “another form of thinking about oneself. Thinking about men is a default; what would you rather think about?”

Alphabetical Diaries beautifully expands and complements Heti’s larger, moral project. Her genius is to poke at the things in writing that are real and the things in life that are false, to use her findings in art to seek impossible answers to the most human questions. What is life? Why are we here? What does it mean to live among others? To foster intimacy, connection? The elliptical, spreadsheet-enabled arrangement of her private thoughts opens up space for readers to revel in the pleasures of asking, again and again, even when clarity may never arrive. As Heti has it: “There is no answer; no way out of life, no avoiding what life has in store for you.”