Alphabetical Diaries
Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti collected half a million words from a decade’s worth of journals, put them in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She spent the next ten years cutting and refining, and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.
‘I think Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is a future classic. A great concept executed perfectly.’
— Zadie Smith, author of The Fraud
‘It’s also thrilling, very funny, often filthy, and a surprisingly powerful weapon against loneliness, at least for this reader. How it achieves all this has to do with the sentences themselves, but even more than that with the unlikelihood of their arrangement; it’s the sentences’ crackpot proximity to one another that makes them sing (admittedly a very odd song)…. Alphabetical Diaries ends up, I think, in truly surprising territory. Heti has outsourced authorship to the alphabet; it is in charge of arranging the material; it supersedes time itself. In this way, Heti disrupts the tidying up of identity that memoirists unconsciously perform.’
— Claire Dederer, Guardian
‘In embracing life’s randomness and so thoroughly disrupting the urge to impose, through prose, order and a sense of the evolving self, [Heti] ultimately reveals just how solid our innate characteristics are and how irrepressible narrative can be.’
— Hephzibah Anderson, Observer
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine deemed one of the New Classics of the twenty-first century. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto, Canada. Alphabetical Diaries is her first book with Fitzcarraldo Editions.
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