Sheila Heti recounts the ABCs of her evolution in new book of diary entries

On the Shelf Alphabetical Diaries By Sheila Heti Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 224 pages, $27 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores Talking to Sheila Heti is disarming. In “Alphabetical Diaries,” Heti has once again tried something that feels impossible: collecting her personal diary entries for more than 10 years, reordering the sentences in alphabetical order, shaping, cutting, colliding, to build a different form of narrative. I wanted to do something so I wouldn’t forget what my real life had been.” For years, Heti had no intention to publish the diaries, “and then slowly, I started to think, this is actually interesting to read.” She broke them into individual sentences, then alphabetized them in a spreadsheet, “I think I thought that if I alphabetized them, I would be able to look at who I had been in a sort of systematic, removed, more scientific or analytical way, not getting lost in the various narratives or stories,” but for a long time she struggled with what to do with them. “There’s so much more actual jumping around in time in life than a traditional kind of narrative can capture.” In real life, and in “Diaries,” we move to memories, yearnings, cast about into the future. “The self feels less personal to me now.… I think getting older you become less interested in your own self-image, your own reflection, and more curious about what do we all have in common.” One of the reasons, she says, that she felt no shame about the bits of herself we see in the diaries was because “I don’t imagine I’ve ever thought or felt a thing that other people haven’t also felt.” Like life, “Alphabetical Diaries” is destabilizing at first.