ALPHABETICAL DIARIES

An acclaimed novelist shares her thoughts from A to Z.

Heti, known for her experimental literary works, including Motherhood and Pure Colour, presents a collection of sentences from 10 years’ worth of diary entries, divided into alphabetized chapters. The result is a curiously disjunctive narrative that nevertheless reveals distinct patterns. By persevering through what must initially seem like an inventory of random statements, readers will become familiar with a set of thematic preoccupations: anxieties about professional success, churning erotic aspirations and frustrations, self-deprecating confessions masking self-regard. Heti provides some genuine fun in her invitation to discover more conventional coherence by reconstructing a chronological version of events. Most amusing is the revelation within the alphabetic jumble of the consistent dynamics of the author’s romantic relationships. A sentence in chapter C—“Cause I really have been thinking about it and realizing that this is what I always do: move in with someone and almost instantly get depressed. Cause I’ll leave. Cause I’m selfish”—encourages us to consider distant sentences from this and other chapters in order to understand a broader context. Other attempts at sense-making are teasingly thwarted, since abstract ideas that require more than a single sentence to become coherent resist our understanding: “I thought that humans, on the whole, were not so great, not as great as they’re made out to be.” Intriguingly, an original form of self-exposure emerges as we see some of the author’s verbal habits laid bare. Seeing a very long series of sentences beginning “Of course,” for instance, produces a memorable sense of character revelation. One may question, perhaps, whether the rewards of this book justify its demands, since what we can glean of Heti’s inner life finally seems rather prosaic, no matter the innovative arrangement of its expression.

An unusual and sometimes humorous arrangement of self-reflections.