In This Fleet, Funny Novel, a Writer Makes Art and Sells Out in Hollywood
The heroine of Danzy Senna’s new book is a novelist envious of the material pleasures all around her in Hollywood.
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Angela Lewis Through her acclaimed novels “How Should a Person Be?,” “Motherhood” and “Pure Colour,” Sheila Heti has blended the autobiographical and the fictitious in the pursuit of truth. Her newest book, “ Alphabetical Diaries ,” out Feb. 6 via Farrar, Straus and Giroux, conjures magic out of a wild exercise: Heti took a decade of her diary entries and alphabetized each sentence, stripping away extraneous ideas and creating a rush through her mind. Heti spoke with Variety about her process for this unconventional work and how she’s able to be so honest in her writing. “ Alphabetical Diaries ” started as a series of columns in The New York Times in 2022. What was the genesis of looking at your diaries and thinking , “There’s something here I could expand on”? I started working on this in 2010, so there were many different forms. The New York Times form was the last before the book, but there was the idea that it was going to be an Internet project at one point that was 500,000 words. What started me thinking about it was I had all this writing on my computer, all these years of diary entries and I had just finished writing “How Should a Person Be?” I’d worked on that book for seven years, and when it was done, I still had that working energy, but I had no idea for a new book. So I thought, “What if I look back on these years that I had fictionalized in this novel?” and just started. What were those years really like? What were the thoughts that I was really having? It’s so easy when you make a fictional work about your life to take that as the real life that you lived. I didn’t want to be confused. But I didn’t want to read through them. So I thought, “Maybe if I have this way of looking through them alphabetically, I can get an overview of what that time was like, the themes and repetitions.” So it was the impulse to ground myself in what had […]
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The heroine of Danzy Senna’s new book is a novelist envious of the material pleasures all around her in Hollywood.
Kelly Blatz directing KJ Apa in ‘One Fast Move.’ Photo Credit: Frank Masi. Filmmaker Kelly Blatz chatted about writing and
