Sheila Heti

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 way: 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.

Alphabetical Diaries

Marion

I wonder if the beginning of a friendship is the optimistic waiting for something bad to happen, which can be overcome together, at which point the real friendship can begin. 

taylor miles hopkins

A nice kind of animal impulse to want to sit near a tree, just because it's a tree…

 Affirmation can always be found from someone in any crowd, if that is what you are seeking.

Art is not essential, but love is essential, and maybe that is why people make art, to express their love of something—that tree, humans, the world, language, intensity of thought and the person who doesn't respond to a work of art is perhaps missing the love of the thing which the artist is pointing to, lovingly. 

Because there is no God to ask forgiveness from if we trespass religious laws, we must ask for forgiveness from each other for trespassing or failing to honour human laws. 

But as I was saying this, I was realizing that my feeling about it was changing, and I saw that there was something fascinating about living only one life, and in some ways there is a great privilege in getting to live only one life and not having to live any others.

I apologized to him, and now there is just the rest of my life. 

I realize more and more these days that people finish things and live in a world of time, rather than not finishing or taking forever for the sake of the eternal.

That night we dressed for dinner, and there was dinner. That seems to be the way it works.

To write one thing that is honest instead of a pack of lies well said.

Alphabetical Diaries quotes

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