The Invisible Dog Art Center and Books Are Magic are thrilled to welcome Sheila Heti and her latest book Alphabetical Diaries and conversation with Lillian Fishman.
A thrilling confessional from the award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour.
Sheila Heti’s books are our modern classics. They’re also radical and inventive and, as David Haglund noted in The New York Times Book Review, “nearly unclassifiable,” gloriously heedless of any expectations we might have about what writing should be. These are books that raise an inevitable question: what would it be like to live inside this author’s head?
Last year, when The New York Times published ten installments of Heti’s “A Diary in AlphabeticalOrder,” she gave us a glimpse. Now, we’re excited to share the complete Alphabetical Diaries, a project two decades in the making that is unlike anything we’ve seen from Sheila Heti (or, frankly, from any other writer): a chronicle of the self, of the fundamentals and idiosyncrasies of human experience, that plays out thrillingly in the space that Heti has staked out between life and art, reality and fiction.
Over a ten-year period, Heti kept a record of her thoughts, which she then alphabetized by sentence in an Excel spreadsheet. She spent the next ten years cutting (500,000 words down to 60,000) and refining, always maintaining the alphabetical order even as she conjured rhythm and beauty out of a decade’s worth of text. The result is sentences selected so that each one sings with those that precede and follow it, demanding to be read together despite our awareness that they may have been written months, even years, apart. As one letter of the alphabet gives way to the next, core preoccupations – sex and settling down, money and the lack thereof, working and writing – emerge, and narratives of love affairs and friendships, of growing up and making art, take shape. The diaries are funny and wrenching and frequently both at the same time. They are an irresistible, insoluble puzzle, keeping the brain in constant motion. One individual’s intimate archive – the author’s exercise in self-knowledge – they are also a way for us, as readers, to know ourselves.
Sheila Heti is the author of eleven books, including the novels Pure Colour, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be?, which New York deemed one of the "New Classics" of the twenty-first century. She was named one of the "New Vanguard" by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-four languages. She lives in Toronto.
Lillian Fishman's first novel, Acts of Service, was one of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022. She’s received support from the Axinn Foundation and Yaddo. She lives in New York.
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