Alphabetical Diaries is, however, an extraordinary work of narrative.
And she understands what I’m getting at: “There must be other ways to write a diary than all this minutiae; I don’t want another night at home with all my thoughts.”
And so it’s really, really, really hard not to judge her.
And so, reading Alphabetical Diaries, I was judgmental of Sheila Heti: of the fact that she published 60,000 words of her diaries.
And yes, one of the functions of a diary is to vomit out our passions and worst selves onto the page, to objectify them and make them physically incarnate, and then to toss them aside.
Because liberalism is a lie, and so am I.
Because she’s a woman who enjoys having sex, and writes about it, and publishes what she writes.
Because she’s part of the cosmopolitan “creative class,” with all the grating parochialisms that come with that.
But in this book, “you” is just another word for “I”…which is actually pretty interesting, if you think about it.
But it’s difficult not to read someone else’s diaries, however scrambled and encrypted, without becoming judgmental.
But judgmentalism is not just ugly—it’s a sin, probably the most serious sin, the ultimate misstep anyone can make when interacting with another human, whether in person or on the page.
But private diaries are not typically edited and published by their author, which is what Heti did here (along with the alphabetizing).
But she continues: “It’s amazing to me how life keeps going.”
But the minutiae is of course why this book works at all.
But then she writes, correctly: “When you are jealous of other people, you forget there is a place in the world for you, that you occupy a real and legitimate place.”
For example: “To write one thing that is honest instead of a pack of lies well said. To write the book about being a loser. To write this book again. To write with the thoroughness of my whole being for the rest of my life. Today I shampooed the hair of a man named David who is the conductor of the orchestra at the National Ballet.”
Her meditations on lust and love are ultimately quite fruitful: “But my task is not to love him, but simply to love—to be a person who loves—so to love him as part of an overall loving, not at the exclusion of everyone else, with blinders on, focused only on him, but rather focused on the entire universe, for the universe is my first relationship, the fundamental one….”
Her meditations on writing, which all contradict each other, also all ring true: “If I want to write, I have to move away from, not towards, the dazzle.”
Her thoughts about work, and how to think about one’s own projects (whether writing projects or the kinds of projects you don’t want to do but that other people require you to do) are often extremely moving: “I realize more and more these days that people finish things and live in a world of time, rather than nothing finishing or taking forever for the sake of the eternal.”
How can I, an enlightened liberal, be so harsh and shocked when a woman expresses her sexuality?
I decided to read Alphabetical Diaries immediately upon hearing the premise: a person’s diary edited down and all the sentences reordered in alphabetical order.
I didn’t care whether I would like the book or not; I wanted to experience it.
I once had an idea for my wake, for after I die: I would have my loved ones post my entire Internet browsing history on the walls, everywhere for everyone to read, uncensored, like a kind of self-immolating art exhibit.
I related painfully to this sentence: “It is clear that I have spent these past three years thinking about myself, and that I have a gap in my education three years long.”
(I think, therefore I am?)
I think we can all imagine worse fates.
I thought it might be more like poetry, which I read more than prose, than narrative fiction or memoir.
I was dreading the chapters “I” and “T,” because they would include the words “I” and “then.”
I wouldn’t have been so judgmental of this project if Heti was a man, and so I’m a misogynist, or at least I have strong misogynistic tendencies, and I’ll freely admit that.
I’m not entirely sympathetic to the idea that writing is a lonely, painful activity: “When I think of another year of writing, it seems impossible to explain.”
In English, the letter “Y” appears near the end of the alphabet, and so “you” comes last, which is a good metaphor for the West, just as ya’s position in the Russian alphabet is a good metaphor for the East.
In Russian, my Russian professor used to say, the alphabet ends with the letter “Ya,” which is also a word that translates into the English “I,” so that “I”—the individual—always comes last in Russian.
It’s like life as a woman under the Taliban doesn’t exist, or something.
More on the theme of work and artistry: “It’s better to work, to go into the underground cave where there are books, than to fritter away time online. It’s crazy that I need all of these mental crutches in order to live. It’s fiction. It’s fine.”
My idea about my wake and the browser history.
Of how fucking much she writes about her damn relationships—romances and friendships and fellow creatives—and how she must assume that these relationships are intrinsically compelling to her readers.
Of how invested she is in being “a writer” (“everything has to be sacrificed for writing,” she says) and in fame (“they want to know that after suffering comes salvation, and that salvation will come in the form of fame”).
Of how much she frets about her (largely successful) writing career.
Of how much she talks about the universe as if it has four corners: New York, Paris, London, and California (Toronto, she writes, is just “a pot of concrete”…which I suppose she has the right to say, because she’s from Toronto).
Of how much she writes about sex, and how if a male author wrote about sex like she does, it would be “problematic” (one of her white male friends complains about this fact, complains that he cannot “feel he owns his experiences sufficiently or, if he owns them they do not matter—they are not the important stories to be told”).
Of how narcissistic that seems, and how self-pitying.
Of how privileged she seems, even when it’s clear she struggles with money and can’t keep up with the lifestyles of her peers.
Of how quickly she’d likely agree with what I’ve just written, of how quickly she’d efface herself and accept my judgments.
Okay, who cares?
One thing I didn’t consider was how many other great words begin with “th,” including the word “then.”
Perhaps those are the sacred things in life.
She complains: “I never meet any new people. I never meet any of the interesting people there are to meet.”
She is at least quite critical of her desire for fame and success: “You are nothing but slime, aspiring slime. … Your ugly hollow aspiration.”
She meditates on first knowledge, I think, when she writes: “Use whatever techniques you want and remember what you first knew: that it doesn’t matter what the book is about.”
She pities herself, like we all do, for her inability to be other people: “Walking home from the party, I was upset, thinking Agnes had it all because she had a husband, and now she could have a kid, while I had nothing.”
She says that she wants to write “fiction and nonfiction together, because the imagination is more amazing than anything in life, and life is more amazing than anything you can make up.”
She wants “to be neither beautiful nor famous nor eccentric” (or maybe not; she might be referring to someone else here, I don’t know).
She whines: “I once believed that making art was going to bring me happiness and success and be this pretty thing.”
She writes, “It is a great failure to age.”
She writes, “That’s all I want to know, what the human laws are,” and isn’t that what we all want to know?
She writes, “When you break up with someone, you feel you must have had such incredible powers of self-deception to have gone out with them at all,” and damn, that rang true.
She writes, correctly: “We don’t have a reigning morality. We don’t have a unified religion or philosophy. We don’t know what to be afraid of.”
She writes: “I have started playing Tetris, which feels halfway between writing and drinking.”
She writes: “I love the entire universe and everything in it.”
She writes: “I put my teeth in my pocket.”
She writes: “If in ten years I have a personality, that would be nice.”
She writes: “Regretting not being in New York, a feeling I suppose I will always have” (vomit).
She writes: “We can’t look at humans directly because it’s too hard. We can’t look at ourselves.
We can’t see where cruelty or selfishness comes from.”
She writes: “You can’t afford to move to New York. … You probably won’t move to New York. You probably won’t move to Paris. You see magic and beauty everywhere. … You will probably die in Toronto.”
Some things in life are impossible to explain and that doesn’t have to be a problem.
Sometimes she is Aristotelian: “Everything is very close right now, is about to be brought into being, is just millimeters away.”
Sometimes she is Platonic: “Everything is more beautiful and glittering in my mind than it ever is in real life.”
That, again, is the truth Alphabetical Diaries reveals.
(That’s actually a really horrible thing for me to insert into another person’s head, and I apologize to Sheila Heti for doing it.)
That’s what Heti is doing here, in her own way, and it works so, so well.
The urgency is palpable.
The way these sentences smash together, the juxtaposition of her ambitions and the mundane, is extremely satisfying.
This isn’t just about the knowledge she first acquired as a writer, but the knowledge she was born with, the instinctive knowledge we’re all born with, I think.
When she gets to “then,” a narrative forms that is exhilarating: “Then…then…then…then….”
Why am I so judgmental?