featured-image

MEMOIR Alphabetical Diaries Sheila Heti, Allen & Unwin, $24.99 Sheila Heti’s new book Alphabetical Diaries is as its name suggests: a book composed of sentences taken from her diaries, arranged alphabetically and assembled in 26 chapters from A to Z. The result is a compelling work that feels both formally brand new, and therefore disorienting, and uncannily familiar in its evocations of life.

Defined as an “essay”, like all of Heti’s books, Alphabetical Diaries eludes categorisation and continues her ongoing investigations into her own life and art, which she conducts with an almost scientific rigour. As she writes: “That’s all I want to know, what the human laws are.” The author of 11 books – including the acclaimed works of fiction, How Should a Person Be? (2010), Motherhood (2018) and Pure Colour (2022) – Heti pushes literature into places that resist language to capture the texture of lived experience.



She is always experimenting. After How Should a Person Be? was published, she decided to examine the diaries she’d kept while writing it. She wanted to distinguish her life from her art: to learn what her life was actually like during those years when she was writing the novel based on it – a novel narrated mostly in the first-person singular by a protagonist called Sheila.

This urge is neatly captured in a diary fragment: “No one at this point in history knows how to live, so we read biographies and memoirs, hoping to get some clues.” To allow he.

Back to Beauty Page