#46: Sheila Heti's ALPHABETICAL DIARIES
The first I knew of it, it was called CANALS. When she spoke of it first - at an event in March 2019 at Birkbeck for her then-new novel MOTHERHOOD - J and I had arrived late from wetting our whistles at a nearby pub (a diversion we came to regret when it became clear we were also close to wetting ourselves during said event). Sheila mentioned in passing that she’d had a meeting with Jacques Testard earlier that same day and that Fitzcarraldo planned on publishing a collection of her diaries in 2020. When the book failed to materialise in bookshops in subsequent years (pandemic notwithstanding), I’d gotten to thinking that I’d imagined it.
As of last week, however, here it is in all its blinding white glory, published by Fitzcarraldo as foretold, albeit with a new (and imo less interesting) title of ALPHABETICAL DIARIES. As its now self-evident title suggests, here are Sheila Heti’s diaries from the last 10 years arranged from A to Z according to the first letter of each sentence, compiled with, I suspect, no small amount of curation on the part of the author. This editorial process is genuinely light-handed, sure but nonetheless establishes an interesting dichotomy from the off – a text that appears, superficially, to be organised according to a seemingly arbitrary principle (A to Z) but which is, in fact, meticulously constructed so as to pull off the high-wire act of mapping a single person’s consciousness over the course of a decade, in all of its glittering multiplicity and relentless mundanity.
And indeed all of life is here, each minute impulse expressed and tethered to its opposite number: Heti’s ambition for her art (the book is beautiful and practically perfect) counterbalanced by her gnawing self-doubt (the book feels arid and empty to me now, like a shrivelled arm that can’t raise itself to shake your hand) and the occasionally crippling sense of worthlessness provoked by her literary pretensions (your apprentice books. your apprentice life. your ugly hollow aspiration). Her intense self-knowledge (it is annoying that it takes thirty years to be an adult. It is becoming very embarrassing) and self-laceration, laced with imperatives (stop going onstage, travelling, all of it. Stop googling yourself. Stop reading the reviews. Stop spending money). Her pursuit of love (if I could only win Pavel back – what a simple love we had! – but it’s dying, as he says, it’s dying now) and rejection thereof (then my mind freed itself of men and spun out this long, long movie which was incredibly abstract and brilliant, and it was my mind telling me what I would be capable of if I didn’t think about men all of the time); her want and need for solitude and hermitage (I am going inside myself and I don’t want to have coffee with anyone anymore!) awkwardly co-existing with her thirst for fame and recognition from her peers (art is too much a tool for ambition, and not even the ambition to make something beautiful…but just the personal ambition to rise above other people).
Above all, Heti outs herself as a person of ferocious intellect, someone with a clear-eyed view of her imperfections, frustrating and relatable in equal measure. She is, of course, abundantly FUNNY too, many of her see-sawing moods drawing genuine hoots of recognition in their excessive despair: If my life becomes a complete and loveless mess, I can always kill myself or do a lot of other things. (Who amongst us can honestly say we haven’t felt similarly at one low point or another?) Indeed, many of the book’s funniest moments spring from the jamming of opposing statements up against one another in a hilarious ping-ponging switchback, a painfully accurate depiction of the equivocation essential to any artistic endeavour: My book is going so badly. My book suddenly makes sense. My book will be done this year! My brain has turned itself off.
I lucked out with an advance copy that I read at the tail-end of last year and, though far from opposed to books with no discernible plot or traditional structure, I was weary that it wouldn’t cohere in the way I so wanted it to. Of course I can now say that I needn’t have worried and read it with enthusiasm, compulsively keen to get back to its pages when we were forced apart by commitments of varying shapes. I read it on the Northern line between stops, perched at the bar of a pub in the City clamouring with rugby fans towards whom I tried to emanate a DON’T TALK TO ME vibe, while sweating through tights on an unseasonably warm September day outside Tate Britain, while on the overground from Clapham Junction to meet J’s new kitten with an armful of sunflowers that came up to my knee.
While there are some narrative through-lines to follow (current lovers and creative projects are chief amongst her preoccupations), many of Heti’s sentences read as aphorisms in their own right — things are hard and should be expected to sometimes be hard — or phrases to live your life by: one must start small – start beyond the self. I found that they set my synapses crackling, buzzing around my head at all times of day, brought into focus by any small connection, conscious or otherwise. Taken as a whole, they’re much more than a snapshot of a single person’s thoughts and feelings at any given moment, more so an encapsulation of the profound sorrows and joys of a life spent in doomed pursuit of creative expression:
If you go into the most deepest, most base feeling inside yourself, which is the fundamental feeling that doesn’t change, then you can start writing and continue writing from there, for that is the feeling that is most fundamentally you, which maybe most calls upon to be expressed. If you hold fiercely to your vision, you will be protected.
And so, while Heti herself sums up the project’s aim in its perfect opening line – a book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to and what is going on in our brain – it’s much more than that: a gift to its readers and, in case it’s not already obvious, abundantly worth the wait.