‘But isn’t it boring?” asked my partner. I had just explained the concept of Alphabetical Diaries, a book which delivers almost exactly what its title promises. The novelist Sheila Heti kept a journal for more than 10 years; she then culled sentences from the pages and arranged those sentences in alphabetical order. The book proceeds from A to Z: in the first chapter, each sentence starts with A, in the second each starts with B, and so on. The structure of the book is slick and oddly captivating. I read it over the holiday season, when lots of people were coming and going from the house, and everyone seemed to want to know more about it. Their curiosity turned quickly to scepticism – the historically correct response to the avant garde.
So, to answer the question: Yes. Absolutely. The book is boring. Sometimes. It’s also thrilling, very funny, often filthy, and a surprisingly powerful weapon against loneliness, at least for this reader. How it achieves all this has to do with the sentences themselves, but even more than that with the unlikelihood of their arrangement; it’s the sentences’ crackpot proximity to one another that makes them sing (admittedly a very odd song). From the W’s: “Why do I look for symbols? Why do women go mad? Why does one bra clasp on the front and the other in back?”
That’s a silly traffic jam of sentences of course, but it’s also a screwball replication of how consciousness operates. Heti’s structure allows her to represent the mind wandering; but also the way it loops and doubles back on itself, reworking over and over the same problems (intractable writing projects, envy of a successful friend, a stubborn attraction to difficult and dominating men). None of this appears wildly novel on its face: the representation of consciousness is hardly a newfangled concern for a book, and Heti’s commitment to the alphabet recalls the work of other experimentalists in narrative restriction, such as Georges Perec, whose novel La Disparition doesn’t contain a single letter “e”.
Even so, Alphabetical Diaries ends up, I think, in truly surprising territory. Heti has outsourced authorship to the alphabet; it is in charge of arranging the material; it supersedes time itself. In this way, Heti disrupts the tidying up of identity that memoirists unconsciously perform. In memoir writing, we use voice and plot to exert the myth of a unified subject. To some degree, we do that in diary-writing as well; we manage the story we are telling ourselves. But when all the sentences are scooped up and rearranged by the unyielding hand of alphabetisation, suddenly the inconsistency of the self is made all too clear: “The world doesn’t need anything from me. The world doesn’t see me, no one is bothering to judge. The world has its place for all of us. The world is great, not mediocre, and I am part of it. The world moves along well enough without my art.” In this way we see not just vacillations of perspective, but vacillations of the ego, the self. Despite the recursive preoccupations, the reader comes away with a sense that the subject is always shifting, blurring, moving in unexpected ways.
I’ve read about the concept of “village drift”, the process by which a settlement might move feet, yards, or even miles over a period of years or decades. That’s the self we see here, moving around in stealthy, slo-mo ways; what appears to be a single person becomes dismantled by alphabetical fiat. The “I” chapter takes up a lot of real estate of course, and this “I” slips around all over the place: “I am so happy the book is done. I am so happy today. I am so sick of myself and all my thoughts, circles, fears, and worries. I am so tired I want to die.”
I for one found this shifting subject to be (mostly) very good company. Maybe that’s because so much of the book is concerned with the problem of writing itself; I felt at times as if a particularly brainy and no-nonsense friend were cheering me on in my own work. “Don’t check your email in the morning or do any other work in the morning apart from typewriter work. Don’t commit to anything. Don’t confess or complain. Don’t forget to write, even if it’s going nowhere.” Very solid writing advice. And if that companion occasionally tests our patience with her self-involvement, well, that’s writers for you.
• Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is published by Fitzcarraldo (£10.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
