On Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
"A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don't want to, and what is going on in our brain."
On Friday after work, I read the last page of Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries (“Zadie Smith looks good on stage. Zip it, he said, then turned away.”), closed the book and opened GoodReads. I always do this when I finish reading a book that I love but think might be divisive.
The response to Alphabetical Diaries was overwhelmingly positive, but a couple of the negative reviews referenced the emperor’s new clothes – the idea that everyone praising the work simply don’t dare admit that they don’t understand it, that there isn’t really anything there. The implication that the 883 4-5 star reviewers are ‘drinking the pretentious’ Kool-Aid interested me because… well, the emperor is indeed wearing no clothes. The lack of clothes is intrinsic to the work. That’s the point. Stripped of context, each line sits naked on the page for the reader to take as it comes.
Critic Max Liu compared the reading experience of Alphabetical Diaries to watching experimental 24-hour film The Clock by Christian Marclay “in that if you surrender to its movement then you will be swept along.” He goes on to say: “Heti has more in common with conceptual artists than with most writers of literary fiction and never has that been more apparent than in this book.”
I couldn’t agree more: I went to see The Clock when it was at the Tate Modern in late 2018 and found myself completely mesmerised by it. I could have stayed for hours, letting time tick by through the textures and colours of cinema clips from every era, while my mind was free to dance between different thoughts, memories and associations.
In 2007, I experienced something similar: my friend Ste and I went to see My Bloody Valentine at the Camden Roundhouse, and we were lucky enough to experience the infamous wall of sound from the barrier – an ear-splitting ten-minute interlude during the track You Made Me Realise. Layers of feedback, distortion and reverb blend to create a cacophony that just… keeps going. Ten whole minutes of solid, gut-wrenching noise. As the music swallowed us, I remember finding ghostly threads of distant melody within the sonic soup, although I couldn’t tell if my overstimulated brain was just desperately trying to organise the flood of chaos into order, like a form of aural hallucination.
Alphabetical Diaries works in a similar way: amidst the organised chaos, tiny narratives present themselves:
Each of these sentences will have been plucked from a different diary entry – a different day, a different time, a different memory – but they flow together to create a slice of life that makes sense for a few brief lines before the random nature of the work takes over once again.
Alphabetical Diaries won’t be for everyone. I think you have to have a high tolerance for self-indulgence, experimentation, and a certain kind of life: cigarettes, cocktails, lovers, grand philosophical musings that meet the minutiae of everyday thoughts and insecurities.
I read it slowly, a little over several months and then a lot in the month of May. I underlined much of it, and imagine I will return to it often. And I can’t wait to read more of Sheila Heti’s work.
I’ll leave you with my favourite lines, an affirmation to carry you through this beautiful sunny Sunday:
