As part of her ongoing investigation into her own life and art, Sheila Heti’s new book is composed of sentences taken from her diaries, arranged alphabetically.
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.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.
To allow herself to scan her diaries quickly, Heti put them in a spreadsheet, sorted the sentences alphabetically, then spent a decade editing them. The result is a volume of 163 densely packed pages of sentences with no paragraph breaks that scroll through the alphabet, capturing moments of life with revelatory frankness and immediacy.
It opens: “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together in its binding. A book is like a shopping mart, all the selections.
So, perhaps this is a book that offers life in terms of feelings and values? But no, of course not, because this is composed from life and contains all the fleetingness of the author’s thinking, its repetitions, obsessions, contradictions, recurring people, things and places: “My main wish for life right now is not to think about men all the time, but to ever more think about men less and less, and to look around at the world, and at my books, and at the books I want to write and the work I...
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