Alphabetical Diaries book review: How to write a book using Excel

To write 'Alphabetical Diaries', celebrated author Sheila Heti entered over 10 years and 500,000 words of her diaries into Excel and drastically pared them down, presenting the result in 26 brief chapters. These entries are arranged alphabetically in the book, according to the first words of her sentences. (Representational image credit: Jess Bailey via Pexels)

More than a decade ago, David Shields published Reality Hunger, a manifesto that challenged conventional assumptions about literature. Rejecting linear, realist, and plotted forms, Shields championed those that were random, fragmented, and collaged. He also called for breaching the barriers separating fiction from nonfiction.

To match this ideal, Shields’s book itself comprised 26 sections arranged alphabetically, containing fragments, quotations, and reflections, many of them from other writers. “The world exists,” wrote Shields. “Why recreate it?” Instead, he recommended borrowing and recontextualising existing material to create new meanings and genres.

Reality Hunger was influential and sparked debate, but it was also criticised at the time for ignoring earlier anti-realist traditions as well as downplaying literature’s imaginative possibilities. With the benefit of hindsight, it looks like Shields captured something that was already in the air: witness the subsequent novels-in-fragments by Jenny Offill and Maggie Nelson, the blending of the personal and the fabricated by Ben Lerner and Teju Cole, among others, and the rise of so-called autofictional novels.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti, in particular, appears to share many affinities with Shields’s ideas. Take How Should A Person Be, which reconstructs actual elements of Heti's life and those of her friends; and Motherhood, a non-linear meditation on whether to start a family, again mirroring her own experiences.

In Alphabetical Diaries, her new book, Heti employs another boundary-blurring, Oulipo-like approach. To create the work, she entered over 10 years and 500,000 words of her diaries into Excel and drastically pared them down, presenting the result in 26 brief chapters. These are arranged not chronologically but alphabetically, according to the first words of her sentences.

The first entry sets the tone: “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain.” What follows is the textual equivalent of a non-sequential arrangement of MRI brain scans over the years. The result is raw, affecting, and disorienting.

Heti’s structure does away with temporality, creating chains of unmoored sentences. The entry “But love can endure” is followed by: “But love is not enough. But love without compatibility is a constant pain”. We can appreciate the wryness without knowing the order those realisations came in. Three other consecutive entries drive home the same point: “Grandma died. Grandma has been sick. Grandma is ailing still.”

As with many diaries, there is unsparing honesty in these pages. Much of this is to do with the nature of love and lust, as well as writing, friendship, and the necessity – or not – of sustaining relationships. These observations are tinged with jealousy, grasping, and ambition, as well as the urge to rise above them. Money is another constant: the need for it, the lack of it, and the spending of it. There are many exhortations to do better: “Don’t be covetous. Don’t be fatalistic. Don’t be frivolous.”

Characters flicker in and out: lovers and friends appear, some more frequently than others, and passions are analysed. It is hard to gain a coherent sense of these bonds because of the doing away of cause and effect – but then, that is not the point of the book. As one entry reads: “I wonder if that’s what life is going to be—a gradual process of moving away from all the things which seemed to promise a centre.”

Heti also preserves the sheer mundanity of life often captured in diaries. “A quiche and then an apple pie for dessert?” she asks at one point, and later: “Had a shower, got dressed, went to buy toilet paper, had tea, sat down at the computer.” There are frequent notes on travel: “I am in Istanbul. I am in New York. I am in Paris with nothing to do but be here for two more weeks.” Such observations play the role of grounding and sometimes ironising the rest.

To stretch a point, the book’s architecture can be seen as an attempt to fuse the Western Enlightenment impulse to classify with the Romantic urge to privilege emotions. Other tensions simmer between the lines: editing versus writing, reality versus fabrication, and author versus character.

Some entries shrewdly gesture towards the form itself. “A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope,” reads one of them. Elsewhere: “It will not be fiction, and it will not tell a story, and there will be no characters, and you will not worry about the voice or the way it is written, just about what you are saying.” Nevertheless, she warns herself: “Don’t forget that although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience.”

Is this experience more than watching her re-arrange furniture in the living room of authenticity? Alphabetical Diaries is of necessity plotless, but is it also pointless? The answers present themselves in the course of reading the book. Heti’s diary entries reveal the dizzying nature of the unstable self: what it clings to, what it lets go of, and the repetitive nature of its concerns. She lays bare the shifting ways in which a socially-constructed individual copes with love, loss, ambition and the messy business of living.