Name: Alphabetical Diaries
Rating: 4.357142857142857 (7 reviews)
ISBN: 9780374610791

Sheila Heti

Named a Recommended Read of the Year by The New Yorker and a New York Times Critics Top Book of the Year One of The Los Angeles Times's 15 Best Books of the Year One of The New Statesman's 20 Best Books of the Year An Electric Literature and Literary Hub Best Nonfiction Book of the Year A thrilling confessional from the award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour. Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade’s worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.

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.

Right now I am living on the surface of the earth.

Rosa said, you are your body, there is no distinction. 

Pavel woke in the middle of the night and said confusedly, so is there no connection between the time your train leaves and the time that you were born?

Only now, becoming ever more in relation to others, and not feeling the same unreality I always used to feel, am I starting to have human feelings, not just awe and terror like prehistoric man. 

What century am I living in that I have to pay my debts to modernism?

What can a person accomplish in fiction without a memory?

What you call abbreviation is actually impatience.

When I was talking about geniuses on the couch, Lars said, they just add objects to the world.

His mother telling him to settle down and stop being so transient, that a rolling stone gathers no moss.

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.

Incredible - you feel like you’re puzzling together a plot, while seeing the contradictions of your own mind laid out. 

Alphabetical Diaries

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