Alphabetical Diaries

By Sheila Heti

2024

First Published

3.94

Average Rating

224

Number of Pages

0H01M

Audio Length

An enthralling work from one of our greatest literary innovators, shortlisted for the Giller and winner of the GG for Fiction. A little over a decade ago, Sheila Heti—the award-winning author of a string of modern classics including How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood, and Pure Colour—began looking back at the diaries she'd kept over the previous ten years, searching for signs of deeper change inside herself. She loaded all 500,000 words of her journals into Microsoft Excel, to order the sentences alphabetically and seek out patterns and repetitions. How many times had she written, "I hate him," for example? With the sentences untethered from the narrative of her diaries, she started to see herself—and the Self—in a new as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. Returning to the project over the years, something more universal and novelistic emerged.Alphabetical Diaries is the sublime and probing result—one that rises to the heights of artistry and insight for which Heti is rightfully acclaimed.

Avg Rating

3.94

Number of Ratings

3,063

5 STARS

33%

4 STARS

38%

3 STARS

21%

2 STARS

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Sheila Heti

Author · 12 books

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Motherhood and How Should a Person Be? Her upcoming novel, Pure Colour, will be published on February 15, 2022. Her second children’s book, A Garden of Creatures, illustrated by Esme Shapiro, will be published in May 2022. She was named one of "The New Vanguard" by The New York Times; a list of fifteen writers from around the world who are "shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century." Her books have been translated into twenty-three languages. Motherhood was chosen by the book critics at the New York Times as one of the top books of 2018, and New York magazine chose it as the Best Book of the year. How Should a Person Be? was named one of the 12 “New Classics of the 21st century” by Vulture. It was a New York Times Notable Book, a best book of the year in The New Yorker, and was cited by Time as "one of the most talked-about books of the year.” Women in Clothes, a collaboration with Leanne Shapton, Heidi Julavits, and 639 women from around the world, was a New York Times bestseller. She is also the author of a children’s book titled We Need a Horse, with art by Clare Rojas. Her play, All Our Happy Days are Stupid, had sold-out runs at The Kitchen in New York and Videofag in Toronto. She is the former Interviews Editor of The Believer magazine, and has conducted many long-form print interviews with writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Elena Ferrante, Agnes Varda, Sophie Calle, Dave Hickey and John Currin. Her fiction and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Bookforum, n+1, Granta, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere. She has spoken at the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, the New Yorker Festival, the 92nd Street Y, the Hammer Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and at universities across North America, and festivals internationally. Her six-hour lecture on writing, delivered in the Spring of 2021, can be purchased through the Leslie Shipman agency. She is the founder of the Trampoline Hall lecture series, and appeared in Margaux Williamson’s 2012 film Teenager Hamlet, and in Leanne Shapton’s book, Important Artifacts. She lives in Toronto.