The way this plays with form and genre really blew my mind. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before, yet such a seemingly simple concept. Loved the jumbled yet somehow also organised nature, just a stream of consciousness you could float along with, completely captivated. Full of moments of brilliance - undiluted, unfiltered brilliance.
Really enjoyed the juxtaposition of an utterly unhinged or intensely horny thought immediately followed by a tender, sensitive musing, something more carefully crafted, so insightful. Spent a lot of time chuckling and nodding along to myself.
Such a strong voice throughout. Really gripped me from the beginning, as much as I thought I’d struggle with the structure, if anything it made it easier to read. The pacing often matched the way I tend to think.
Resonate so deeply, as ever, with many many parts. What a mind. Clever, ballsy, fascinating. I had so much fun reading! ♥️

A brilliant book from a brilliant author. Sheila Heti is a longterm favourite and this book continues to cement her as such.

An intriguing idea and I found the reading experience similar to reading Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (though I preferred that because it did develop a bit of linear plot at some point). Recommend not trying to read it all in one go and just going with the flow. Some really lovely observations and sentences. Still yet to find a Sheila Heti book I adore as much as Motherhood though.

Sheila Heti's "Alphabetical Diaries" is a unique experiment in self-reflection. Instead of a chronological narrative, Heti takes ten years of diary entries and arranges them alphabetically, sentence by sentence. This fragmented approach creates a surprising coherence, revealing patterns in her thoughts and anxieties over time.

While unconventional, the book offers an intimate portrait of Heti's life. We encounter moments of joy, despair, and deep introspection on topics like love, creativity, and the purpose of art. Heti's prose is sharp and often witty, making the unconventional format surprisingly engaging.

"Alphabetical Diaries" won't be for everyone. Those seeking a traditional memoir may find the disjointed structure frustrating. However, for readers open to a new way of storytelling, this book offers a thought-provoking exploration of the human experience and the power of language.

I just know there is a Sheila Heti book out there that I will adore, but this wasn’t it sadly.

A collection of ten years worth of Sheila’s diary entries collated in alphabetical order, this sounded a really unique structure, but ultimately I found it difficult to fully engage with.

I’m going to read Motherhood soon which I hope will be more up my alley.

Alphabetical Diaries is Sheila Heti’s 10 years worth of diaries rearranged in alphabetical order. Each sentence has now been alphabetised.

You might feel at first like you’re wading through a jumble of sentences but the fog does lift up, it reveals patterns & motifs. It’s about trusting your human impulse to find order in disorder, reason in chaos.

The themes are recognisable: art, men, the meaning of life, writing, family, friends, ambivalence towards motherhood, sex, all of this mixed up with mundane to-do lists.

“It seems the main accomplishment now is to make a thing like a baby. It seems urgent and necessary. It should flow like ink from a pen. It should show the hole, the lack. It sounded like a 16th century world.”

There is something playful about the randomness of these sentences, it feels at times like a living puzzle where the pieces magically join together. Witness the clusters of grief, confusion, anger or horniness assemble like a murmur of starlings.
The sentences create new synapses, these juxtapositions create new meanings, sometimes hilarious, sometimes profound.

As interesting as this experience has been, I am not sure that I wouldn’t have equally enjoyed her diaries in a chronological form. I was driven partly by my love for Sheila Heti’s singular voice, her hard-hitting aphorisms, her ability to express the petty & the uncomfortable. And partly by a voyeuristic curiosity for the inner human experience.

One question stayed with me as I was reading Alphabetical Diaries. What is my place here as a reader?
Diaries are not traditionally written with a reader in mind & when Heti randomises her output, the possibility of a relationship between reader and writer feels even more diffused.
I feel a little shallow pondering on the matter, but is it important to feel like you are wanted when reading any piece of writing?
I never felt like I was invited in the room with Heti, but rather relegated behind the door, peeping through the keyhole like a creepy little goblin.

Stream of consciousness writing style. Because the diary entries are written from A to Z it makes the writing almost stilted as Heti jumps around into non linear timelines. Just not for me so DNF

Sheila Heti is known for her willingness to play with form and creative processes. Here she dives into what’s been dubbed experimental non-fiction with a piece that evolved slowly out of Heti’s own diaries. Ones she kept over a period of years, deliberately pared-down and gradually reorganised, ruthlessly edited so that 500,000 sentences became a selection of 60,000. All arranged in alphabetical order, from sentences beginning with ‘A’ onwards. Carefully-curated sentences which Heti then attempted to analyse, searching for patterns, for submerged clues to the nature or meaning of her life in progress. Some aspects may be familiar from the extracts from earlier versions published in n+1 and later The New York Times.

The end result can be frustratingly enigmatic, even bewildering at times but it can also be strikingly provocative, playful, and weirdly intimate. Heti’s sentences range from banal descriptions of meal plans to aphoristic sayings about art or love or sex worthy of Karl Kraus. Fragments of stories emerge, portraits of friendships, encounters, places, and the process of writing. Stretches read like prose poetry, others hang together precariously – intended meanings inflected by happenstance, associations imposed by the act of reading itself, my brain refusing, or unable, to resist attempts to impose structure or pry out underlying narratives. Heti’s piece has been compared to Joe Brainerd’s representation of his life experiences in his resonant I Remember a work I also found surprisingly rich despite its outward simplicity. Heti’s piece is not quite as visceral, or always as immediate, as Brainerd’s but I found it compelling throughout.

“Today is Lemons’s wedding. Today is Thursday. Today is Tuesday. Tonight he said that pain was not punishment, and I cried in bed with him, although I’m not sure he knew it;”

A fragmentary memoir told in a non-linear fashion so that all timelines converge in a way that muddies the truth. Raw and vulnerable, experimental and deeply observational. This was a quick, engaging and propulsive narrative, written with a sense of urgency. This was my first Heti but it won’t be my last.

Often, our impulse is to chronicle the past linearly. The pursuit of diarism and journaling is to regurgitate the day as it happened, as if this might make sense of history. In this work, Heti scrambles time, reducing a discrete period into its constituent parts and reassembling them into a new whole.

I wanted to love this but I hated it so much. Perhaps it’s just a failure of imagination on my part.

I’m actually not sure when this comes out, so apologies if I’m about to recommend something you can’t read for months, but even on a purely FORM level, Sheila Heti’s latest book is genius. She’s taken her diaries from the last ten years, alphabetised every sentence and, somehow, it works and feels completely effortless. I’m absolutely certain that my diary sentences in alphabetical order would be a) nonsensical, and b) of very little interest.

This was so strange to read, but I loved it? The fragmented nature of all the scattered sentences, forcing you to try connect the dots between what sentence you’re reading, to one you read earlier in the book. A new and remarkable way to give a snapshot into your life.

This was my first Heti book, and I will be picking up more!

My first Heti and I am definitely wanting to read more! I was not convinced by the concept before reading but wow was I wrong. A fascinating and original book that I would recommend to fans of Annie Ernaux and streams of consciousness like Ducks, Newburyport.

This was my first encounter with Sheila Heiti. 'Alphabetical Diaries' is unusual, distinctive and compelling. It feels like it shouldn't possibly work - the author having let go of the reins and allowed an Excel file to structure her diary entries alphabetically - but somehow this bizarre and playful approach results in a really propulsive tension. The next line wasn't intentionally placed to resolve or build upon the previous one, instead having landed there coincidentally. It's fascinating. I wonder what we'd all learn from clustering our own private thoughts in this way.

I had never read anything by Sheila Heti before, so the only thing that drew me to this book was the description. The concept seemed really interesting, but as I started reading it I thought that it could go terribly wrong.
It turns out *I* was wrong, because I really enjoyed this book!

At times it’s more introspective, then it’s more descriptive of people and relationships. You can be reading a more philosophical bit about the human condition, and the next thing you’re reading is about cake types and textures.

There are some really beautiful sentences and whole passages in it, but what’s really great about it is, because of the way it’s structured, you never know what to expect from the next sentence you’re about to read.

This book, for me, was a very interesting reading experience, and a peek into Sheila Heti’s mind. It made me want to explore more of her work.

This was a fascinating read, one of the most original books I've read in some time. It really reminded me of Ducks Newburyport because of the structure of the sentences and you found yourself utterly convinced by the internal dialogue of the writer. Her obsessions, money, sex, love and creativity are universal and her lunging from self doubt or moments of elation constantly catch the reader off guard. As a 'Portrait of an artist' it is fascinating, and fully immersive.

The premise of this was so interesting to me - ten years of a diary reorganised so that every sentence appears in alphabetical order. I would never have thought that this idea would work, but actually, within each letter you can see areas where the sentences come together to form small scenes, or what you could imagine would work as monologues whether internal or external.

I’ve never read anything by Sheila Heti before, but if her fiction is written like her diaries I’ll definitely be picking some up in future. I enjoyed the stream of conscious effect given by the organisation so would definitely recommend it to people who enjoyed things like Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost and the diaries of Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath.

This book has an interesting core concept- what happens if you were to take every sentence you wrote in a diary over a certain period and rearranged it not by time, but purely by alphabet?

Although this sounds overly academic at first, I found the effect oddly riveting. Sometimes more banal sentences would gain power just through repetition (several one-word sentences of 'Alone.' pick up an odd pace, for example) and it is interesting to see the effect this has when certain people's names recur, such as exes of hers, where the effect is almost meditative.

Similarly, the effect is often that characters are introduced at the end of another sentence before we have been introduced to them in more detail, and it feels almost novel-like.

A short book, but one where I don't think the concept would have withstood a much longer text anyhow.

I received a digital copy of this book from NetGalley and the publisher in exchange for an honest review.

I always think I'm going to love everything by Sheila Heti and I'm always disappointed. On paper she's everything I want in an author.
She moved from fiction to auto fiction because inventing characters to go through the motions of real life was such a drag. And I get that. But this is way too experimental with none of joy of deciphering for the audience. Think Cortazar's Hopscotch or even my beloved Choose Your Own Adventure stories. This was like someone finished writing a novel and then accidentally sorted and filtered it in alphabetical order and instead of pressing control Z decided that'll do.
Yes I'm sure it's fun to see most used words and what they reveal about you. But this had an urgency without content and as such, made it hard to read or enjoy or engage with.