The acclaimed novelist Sheila Heti shares an intimate self-portrait that started as a diary and evolved into an experimental work of autofiction.
A DIARY IN ALPHABETICAL ORDERA little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically. Perhaps this would help me identify patterns and repetitions. How many times had I written, “I hate him,” for example? With the sentences untethered from narrative, I started to see the self in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. As I returned to the project over the years, it grew into something more novelistic. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences, to introduce some rhythm and beauty. When The Times asked me for a work of fiction that could be serialized, I thought of these diaries: The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction, and what is a more fundamental mode of serialization than the alphabet? After some editing, here is the result.
By Sheila Heti
A-C https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... y-abc.html
DEFG https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/202 ... y-defg.htm
From My Diaries (2006–10)
in Alphabetical Order
Sheila Heti
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/ ... iFinal.pdf