An exercise in experimentation, Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries started as lines from the author’s diary, which she then entered into an Excel spreadsheet, alphabetized, and edited down. Bound together, these lines form a new story, curated from 10 years of personal thoughts and reflections and reordered out of their original context.
Consider both the power and the purpose of a sentence. Deciding when to end a sentence (rather than using a comma, semicolon, colon, or dash) reflects the writer’s mindset during writing, but when each sentence is then pulled away from its original home and resettled elsewhere, the original (and potentially flippant) decision on punctuation has a huge effect on the new story that results. Each sentence stands alone, out of context, but takes on new meaning—new context—in its alphabetical home.
For me, when reading this text, the question became one of both purposely hidden meanings and new truths: first, the original stories of Heti’s experiences are obscured through the isolation of the sentences; second, new stories are created through the rearrangement; and then finally, many of the sentences are culled, leaving yet another story, perhaps the most purposeful of them all.
Guessing the original order of the sentences gets the reader nowhere, as the sentences have become as reusable as words, both independent and relying on their surroundings for context.
Heti’s approach with this project—repurposing journals and creating fiction within the confines of the original text—is what first drew me to the book, but I was surprised by where my mind traveled while reading the text. I kept thinking about vulnerability in writing. Journaling is often solitary, secretive, deeply personal. Keeping one’s internal thoughts separate from one’s external conversations feels like an essential measure for self-preservation. Like Heti notes in the text, “Persona allows us to participate without always, at every turn, risking everything we’ve got.”
My own mental meanderings while reading Alphabetical Diaries, however, had me reflecting on this question of exposure and vulnerability, in that each of these sentences lays bare a moment of thought without a public filter; put in their new context, the thoughts are protected somehow, hiding in plain sight. Nouns in one sentence and pronouns in the next were not necessarily related in the original text, but become so in this recycling of sentences, leading to a hidden (subversive?) anonymity and to the reader wondering, for example, whether a friend named in one sentence was in fact the one who “appeared in the kitchen doorway and stood there as I read my story to all her friends,” or the one who “searched herself and produced a tiny compass,” or the one who “was almost dead but a little bit alive.”
One especially moving part of the book for me occurred in the first chapter, in which the word “alone” appears four times as its own sentence, and since all sentences are alphabetical, they all appear in a row, building an emphasis that greatly affects the mood of the story, as well as the reader’s consideration of what that word, repeated four times (or perhaps more) as its own sentence means for the author’s original journal text.
Paragraphs would have helped form more of a story here, as each starting letter had its own chapter but the chapters were not further divided into paragraphs. Quick moves to new paragraphs would have built in some extra context for some of the stories, which I as a reader would have appreciated but perhaps Heti as an author wanted to avoid (and I have no doubt she fully considered her structural options).
Reflecting on this book as I was reading it, filling the printed pages with my own notes and exclamation points, and allowing my thoughts to linger on it in the gaps between reading, I was distracted by the knowledge that so much of the original diary is missing—that according to the jacket flap, 500,000 words of her diary were pared down to only 60,000 for the published book. Somehow, I want both more and less from this book: I want both the raw, original story and the new one built from recycled text; the fiction and the nonfiction.
The real truth here is that the book had me considering my own writing. Unburdened by a sense that I needed to “get” the story Heti was presenting, I swirled through my own perceptions of what is possible in creative writing and how (un)important the boundaries of genre are.
Virtually all of the writing from my early adulthood came from a place of angst and self-deprecation. When I think back to what I wrote in my own journals I like to think that I have improved since then, both as a writer and as a person. Xennial tendencies toward embracing innovation aside, I wonder whether each genre needs its own space or whether we should encourage each other to reuse and adapt material, actively merging genres, committing to neither a memoir nor a novel, but rather to the deeper truth of human experience.
Yes, it’s true that I have not landed on one opinion of Alphabetical Diaries—with some content that made me squirm and some that made me catch my breath, some sections that made me yearn for the original truth behind the text and some that let me wallow in the craft involved in this literary approach—but I will relish rereading this text over and over in search of new meaning and wonder.
Zeal for the endeavor seems to be the key, and branching into new writing techniques might require little more than conviction in your work; as Heti notes, “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, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding.”
—
Amanda G. Brandt is a professional writer, editor, and educator. She has worked as a teacher, an editor with an educational publisher, and for nonprofit organizations. Amanda is passionate about learning and sharing what she has learned with others, emphasizing that every day holds countless opportunities for reflection and growth. Amanda received her MFA in Nonfiction from Goucher College, where she earned the 2021 Christine White Award for Memoir/Essay. Her work has appeared in both news and literary publications.