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.
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.