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Sheila Heti Was Wasting Her Time. Then She’d Written a Book.

Sheila Heti, photographed by Yael Malka. “A writer has to follow their curiosity, first and foremost,” writes Sheila Heti in the opening chapter of her nifty and singular new book, Alphabetical Diaries . “A writer is just one person under the stars,” begins the subsequent sentence, “one person in a universe, writing about a whole entire universe.” One could read these lines as a kind of mission statement, for Heti’s literary preoccupations are indeed great in both magnitude and particularity, impelled by her relentless spirit of inquiry toward questions no less daunting and immense than the one that titles her breakout 2010 novel, How Should a Person Be? This new book—a collection of Heti’s personal diaries, written over the course of a decade, then alphabetized and sheared into hypnotic installments of funny, plaintive, and exhortative prose—shows us how people are . Reading it, one is struck by the awesome continuity of the human mind, the way we’re always turning over the same ideas and questions, but also our naked contradictions. A declaration made in one sentence is undermined in the next, or made amusing, more complicated and thorny, and always rendered with Heti’s sense of play and conviction. “Marriage can make misery more bearable,” she writes in the “M” chapter. “Marriage is one step closer to divorce than being in a relationship. Marriage will not settle my restlessness.” When Heti and I spoke last week, she mentioned that working on the project provided respite from the “dark emotional spaces” in which she’d had to immerse herself to write the two autobiographical novels, Motherhood and Pure Colour , that have published in the interim. But Alphabetical Diaries is no less artful or intense for having been arranged in a spreadsheet. At one point in the book, she laments the way one can lose the “wisp of life” in the process of putting thoughts and feels into words. Alphabetical Diaries , however, shows the opposite to be true. SHEILA HETI: Hi. JAKE NEVINS: Hi, Sheila. How are you? HETI: I’m good. I feel ready. NEVINS: Good. Well, I want to start […]

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