We are being watched.
As Sheila Heti discusses her new book, “Alphabetical Diaries,” during a Zoom call from her home in Toronto, her dog Feldman can be seen on screen in the background, his head resting on the arm of the couch, watching her and waiting to go for a walk. Four thousand miles away in Southern California, my own dog is doing the same thing.
“The man’s best friend thing? When I used to hear that I’d think, I guess that’s just what people say. But when you have a dog, you’re like, Oh, it’s actually just the truth; they’re your best friend in this way that no human could ever be. Like, who would ever be sitting there like this?” says Heti about Feldman, who occasionally emits a mournful sigh during our conversation.
The author of acclaimed books that include “Motherhood,” “Pure Colour,” “How Should a Person Be?” and more, Heti created her latest book by extracting lines from 10 years of her diaries and arranging them in alphabetical, rather than chronological or contextual, order to create a unique and compelling reading experience.
“It really did take me a decade to figure out,” she says. “I started to see that, with certain kinds of edits, I was starting to create a world the same way there is one in a novel.
“I was able to see this as a separate fictional world in which a person is living and thinking and moving rather than earlier in the process when it just felt like it was my diaries,” she says.
So is it a novel or a diary or memoir? “At one point, I wanted to call it a memoir, but I think it’s closest to a novel because I don’t feel like it’s confessional,” she says. “I feel like it’s a portrait of a person.”
This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and to reduce how much we talked about our dogs.
Why did you decide to alphabetize your diary in the first place?
I don’t know honestly, I just remember one day I was putting the sentences into Excel and alphabetizing them. I can come up with all sorts of reasons after the fact, but I honestly don’t know what the spark of that idea was.
You got a book idea while using an Excel spreadsheet?
I use Excel a lot. (laughs) I use it to keep track of how many words I’ve written in a day or how many words I’ve cut or just tracking progress. Yeah, I like it. I like Excel very much.
These are actual diary entries. Were you thinking, I have all this writing already — maybe I could put it to use?
Yeah, I’d just finished “How Should a Person Be?” and it was such a huge project — like seven years writing — that I knew was going to be a long time before I had anything else to work on, before I had a lot of material to edit, which is my favorite part of the process. It was like, ‘I have a lot of writing; maybe I can just start working because I like working and I suddenly had nothing to work on. So I think I was like, ‘Here’s this archive — what happens if I start playing with it?’
‘How Should a Person Be?’ was sort of about my life, but this was about my life in a much more real way because ‘How Should a Person Be?’ was this fiction whereas with this, once I pulled all the words together, there was no fiction. It was at first just a diary.
The people and names you mention are fictionalized?
I didn’t write any [new] sentences, but I made composite characters out of the sentences … they were like archetypes of the people that I did encounter over the 10 years. But nobody who was in my life would be able to track any of the characters because they are recombined from sentences about lots of different people turned into one character.
I can imagine that could have been awkward if someone said, Hey, is this me?
I didn’t want anyone to know what I thought about them! [laughs] That was a real puzzle — how would I publish this and not reveal that? And that was the solution.
Typically, people put locks on their diaries and guard them. What’s it like publishing yours as a book for people to read?
I published it in the New York Times last year. I wasn’t scared publishing this book, but I was really scared publishing those excerpts in the Times — they were in a slightly different form, but that was the first time it was really available to such a large audience. And I was really scared. I did think, what kind of person is coming across in these? I couldn’t really tell.
I don’t feel like anyone can judge me for my fiction because those are characters. But this is not a character so much, you know? I was nervous to have friends and my boyfriend read it and I’m just thinking, ‘Am I revealing a self that they don’t know? Am I revealing a self that they’re not going to like?’ None of that seemed to happen, but it was a real fear.
One of the compelling elements of “Alphabetical Diaries” is that the reader starts to build a narrative out of all of these individual lines from your life.
I come from theater. To me, it’s like theater — the audience and the actors, all in a room together, make something. That’s what I think I always want to keep from the world of the theater that I love so much — you make something in tandem with other people who are there with you in the present.
Books are less like that. But there’s a way I’m trying to, I think, make books like that, where you feel like you’re creating a moment with the reader rather than just, ‘Well, here’s the thing I created and now you can experience it.’
You edited out 90 percent of your diaries to get to its final form. Were there things you left in that you weren’t sure whether you wanted to?
I really had to resist that impulse. There were a lot of things where I felt embarrassed. And I just thought, Well, you have to have a better reason for cutting it than that. There’s a kind of discipline in it, like, it’s just a sentence, you know?
As well as being confessional or confiding, diaries can be where we demand self-improvement, saying things like, “Start eating kale!” or “Make more money!” You call these “injunctions” — why do people use that voice when writing to themselves?
That is one of the diary voices, for sure. I think a diary is a place where you organize yourself, where you try and get your thoughts in order and try to get yourself in order … and put all the pieces of yourself in some coherent form. I think a lot of those injunctions are about that.
At least for me, when I write in my diary, there’s some kind of fantasy of like, I’m going to put everything in its place and then afterward I’ll be able to live. I think it does work for like a day … and then it’s revealed as the fantasy it was.
I read the book, and I also listened to the audiobook read by Kate Berlant, which is fantastic. I loved how much she brought to the work, making each line burst with feeling and emotion. How did she come to narrate the book?
Kate’s a friend of mine and I just thought she’d be perfect. I saw her one-woman show in New York. I love her voice. She’s so intelligent. I just felt like she would just bring the perfect sensibility to it. And she absolutely did. I showed her a draft of it years ago. So she’s also known about the project for a very long time, which is fun. It’s kind of like a one-woman show or something listening to it.
You recently co-wrote a story with a chatbot for The New Yorker. People tend to be afraid of AI rather than wanting to work with it.
I understand people who don’t know anything about it feeling like that and I understand people who know a ton about it a feeling like that. It’s not crazy. But for me, I think of it as a tool, a human tool. It’s us in a different form. I find it really fascinating, actually. I like this thing that has access to all of world literature and all of one’s Facebook conversations and all of the Enron emails and just like everything and what comes out of that, because no human can sort of digest that much. So it’s like this new kind of mind, made up of all the text we’ve ever created, or that’s the ambition anyways. I think it’s sort of beautiful and godlike and dumb and wrong and right, and it’s all those things at once.
Going back to the diaries, there are some tough moments when you describe some questionable behavior directed at you. While it could be upsetting, it’s also interesting to note that you chose to include these moments in your book.
Yeah, you always get the last word as a writer.
