In 1960, a group of French writers encouraged by the prospects of form-driven literature founded the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (“workshop of potential literature”). The intent of OULIPO, as it came to be known, was to forefront experimentation over inspiration as a method for writing. Its foundational texts include Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style, about a bus encounter written in ninety-nine different literary techniques. Georges Perec, another famous member, wrote La Disparation, a nearly three-hundred-page novelin which the letter E is completely absent.
Alphabetical Diaries (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024), the new text by Sheila Heti, evokes Oulipian tradition. Rather than depend on any conventional method to fill a blank page, Heti generated the work by cutting and arranging her diary entries from a ten-year period into an abecedarian structure that took another ten years to complete. Excerpts have appeared in other forms before making their way into this book: a very early version of these diary entries appeared in n+1 in 2014, while ten weekly installments ran in the New York Times in 2022.
Themes from her earlier work—How Should a Person Be, Motherhood, and most recently Pure Colour—are dispersed across its pages and include questions of being alive, questions of whether to have children, and observations of the lives of her friends with comparison to her own by reflection on who is doing “it” best. The book’s framing device is reminiscent of a kind of adult “play”—brainy, provocative, and divulging. The beginning is exactly that:
A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding.
This announcement serves as a disclaimer and a warning that while Heti worked with sentences of her own creation, she has also been led by them. In her lecture “Recognizing the Stranger” Isabella Hammad wrote: “It’s difficult, in life, to pinpoint with any real sense of confidence where a turning point is located.” She makes a case for starting in the middle with writing, how a turning point is a human construction produced in retrospect, in hindsight.
It’s a personal history full of turning points that Heti is compiling. The trajectories of these pivots are boundless: repetitions arise, of enjoyment, concerns, anxieties, the need to learn wisdom, foods eaten, desires yearned, aspirations (sexual, career, aesthetics), obsession, crushes, beauty, shortcomings, insistence on change, and the reality of the lack thereof.
Names appear so frequently as to give the illusion of real people as developed characters. They enter and exit at various periods of Heti’s life, particularly romantic partners. Lars is one of these people who we don’t know how long has been a partner or quasi-partner, but we know he is hot, emotionally unavailable, and will never respond to emails. Pavel, another past partner, is more available, maybe too eager; he does respond to emails. When Heti writes of “he” in the “H” section, it could be any of Heti’s lovers, friends, acquaintances, from the names that have reappeared— Hanif, Lars, Lemons, Pavel. Here she seems to create a single composite character who is the “he” out of seemingly many people.
For all the ways Alphabetical Diaries emphasizes Heti’s observations, it is other people that thread narrative intrigue into the work. She writes of her friend Lemons, who “talked openly about being willing to break up with her in order to have five or ten more years without kids.” Marriage didn’t seem on the cards for Lemons and his girlfriend, yet we learn of this when Heti remarks on her “loneliness” after attending his wedding.
But Heti is best when she’s talking with herself. Occasional sentences reveal nuggets of truth nestled around repetition, such as: “A person’s life should not be so filled up that a surprise friend can’t come in, but that doesn’t mean they have to become your new best friend.” Different truths, hilarities or absurdities will stick out to each person:
—As Rosa said, it only takes an afternoon to get pregnant.
—Stop talking to anyone, everyone, about your new projects—just be quiet and think.
—Because another person is not a tool for your self development.
—Not spending money adds energy to your art.
—You know you look to men to distract you from your work.
Alphabetical Diaries lays out examples of how anyone can be prone to self-contradiction.
Heti frequently toys with moving to New York, for example, which she decides against, only to question her potential regret after choosing Toronto instead. These contradictions become more absurd when paired: “Be miserable about the world. Be optimistic, for you know how steady applications always gets you somewhere.” This opens an assertive list of demands to the self; her journal entries are often instructions to the self, instructions to change. Certain words seem to incite Heti into a mood or movement. For example, a sentence beginning with “like” invites a roaming mind: “Like a table with four legs. Like I cut off one head and another grows somewhere else.” It’s this fertility that makes Heti’s experiment thrive.
A diary is born of intimacy and privacy, but privacy here also comes from the lack of plot. Everything is out of context, and we don’t know the story of anything beyond its fragments. Not that protecting privacy or its illusion seems to be of Heti’s concern here, rather it seems like constraint, also an Oulipian device, to keep the work away from autofictions—a genre she catapulted with How Should a Person Be?
This privacy erodes a little in the “I” chapter, an intermission of sorts where the natural self-indulgence of a diary loudens, as though Heti is miking her inner dialog. This is the longest chapter and feels like going through a narrow underwater tunnel in a car: you can’t turn around, there’s nothing to look at but the tunnel itself, yet it’s an essential part of the journey.
—I keep thinking about Lars and how he said, the next time you like a guy, don’t leave the city.
—I realized I had become impractical in my thinking about money, losing sight of its value and how long it takes me to make any.
—I tried on the ruby and gold ring in the antique store, and I found these two shiny aquamarine tiles I bought, and it was all so exhilarating, and I saw how being with a friend in a new city, you were still in relation to the friend, but being alone in a new city, you were entirely in relation to the city itself.
By the end of these first-person passages, something has changed. The pace stretches, demands more patience, and decelerates the rest of the book accordingly.
Alphabetical Diaries ends unsurprisingly with insertions of “you,” with Heti speaking to herself: “You always telescope back into yourself and into your own experiences, but how about telescoping out into the world?” Heti’s landing suggests a summative judgment of herself, an awareness of what she’s doing, of shame, and yet the text also refuses to feel ashamed. As an auto-fictionist, Heti has always dived deeper into herself than most, surfacing with immersive and intoxicating expositions. It can feel relatable and alien, resonant and entirely unfamiliar, a stack of clips from a person’s life presented as literature.
