Alphabetical Diaries

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.