The Brooklyn Rail

From time to time, when I’m feeling ballsy or bored, I’ll take out an armful of old diaries and dive into the notes of my past selves. The scribbled-down spirals and train-ride confessions. The hopes and debates and revelations, all there for me to re-encounter. And as I do, each thought sobers me a bit. Not because they’re embarrassing, which they are, but because the thoughts, whether weeks or years apart, are near-replicas of themselves. Over and over they repeat, teeny variations showing up here and there, revealing the specific patterns of being I’m seemingly doomed to. When I talk to my friends and divulge the latest iterations of my cyclical nature, I’m reminded that they, of course, have their own patterns, and our coming together is another way to parse through our recurring feelings and bad habits. In Sheila Heti’s most recent book, Alphabetical Diaries, recurring feelings rule the page. From romantic hang-ups and desire to anxiety and ennui, the writer’s curated diaries articulate daily life’s ordinary and routine melodramas.

Heti is a writer devoted to grand ideas. Each of the stories she creates carves into the philosophical and attempts to extract the truth—or better yet the many truths about reality and how to live within it. Her sentences are earnest and her gaze is obsessive, evidence of an eager dedication to understanding what she implores. In her novel Pure Colour, following the death of the main character’s father, his spirit “ejaculates into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body.” Then, the father and daughter transcend the limits of the human world and enter a leaf. In Heti’s 2018 autofictional novel, Motherhood, the narrator grapples with the decision to have or not have children—a large question muddled within an even larger question of how she desires to live her life. Throughout the book, the narrator consults the wisdom of the I-Ching, an ancient Chinese divination text, by flipping coins and documenting the results. During one series of questions, she asks “What’s a better thing to steer your life by? Your values?” To which the coins respond yes. In another instance, she wonders if she can be the kind of woman who makes art and has children. “No,” the coins conclude.

Beyond the existential nature of her work, what really makes Heti’s writing magnetic are the playful tactics and structures she employs to investigate the divine. Motherhood has its back-and-forth with the I-Ching. Pure Colour has its Lispector-esque, celestial fragments. And with Alphabetical Diaries, as the title implies, we’re given a sentence-by-sentence alphabetical sequence. The structure is intriguing, and speaks to Heti’s ingenuity and willingness to experiment outside the bounds of literary conventions, a tendency she’s stuck to for years. However, while reading Alphabetical Diaries, I kept wondering if the form was enough to make a collection of journal soliloquies sing.

True to Heti’s confessional style, these entries cover a wide spectrum of emotion and experience. There is considerable rumination on writing and literary parties, and a lot on boyfriends and girlfriends and sex. Some of the most absorbing lines deal with cities and figuring out the conundrum of which one to live in. At one instance, she realizes: “I can have a bigger imagination than to think, New York or L.A.?” A painfully relatable thought. For much of the book, though, the writer contends with the things she does and doesn’t want for herself.

“I don’t want a life in Paris. I don’t want a party. I don’t want just any man … I don’t want to be a mother to a man. I don’t want to be dead in four years. I don’t want to go to any more parties.”

These declarations strung together convey a sense of slight desperation as if the writer hopes that by denouncing unfavorable habits, she’ll finally be freed from their grip. And maybe by documenting who she wants to be, she might reify that perfect person, and bring her to life. Of course, this is one of the main reasons people use journals—to release the negative and manifest the ideal. Many of the sentences in Heti’s diaries engage in this kind of toil. They’re working out big feelings and big questions, trying to get to the other side. However, achieving such a lofty goal is not necessarily the point, and we watch her realize this over and over again.

“[Every] situation is different, and I’m realizing that you cannot avoid unhappiness, and you cannot avoid pain, and you cannot make rules and live by them in order to create a happy life.”

Like all of Heti’s books, the diaries are steeped in a preoccupation with spirituality and making meaning for oneself. But at times, the entries—which are sometimes a series of one-liners such as “control negative thinking” or “conserve your energies”—read less like elegantly crafted prose and more like self-help quotes. Perhaps this is just the natural result of reading another person’s journal. Nonetheless, this line between self-help and spirituality is present and distracts from the book’s intrigue. In a 2021 interview with Ross Simonini, host of the podcast Subject, Object, Verb, Heti shares that she created Alphabetical Diaries as a way to excavate a truth about herself. “I wanted to see if anything changes over ten years. I just wanted to know if I’d grown, or I’d stayed the same.” This acute focus on Heti’s self, on all her quirks and neuroses, and trying to work through them, ultimately evolves from being a fascinating collage of selves to an obsessive examination of self-improvement, which is to say it’s dazzling at first, but inevitably bland and predictable.