Sheila Heti Talks with Parul Sehgal About “Alphabetical Diaries”
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Sheila Hetty is the kind of novelist that people talk about and have really strong opinions about, too. She's been very influential in the literary world and well beyond. Her book, How Should a Person Be? from 2010, helped launch the trend that's called autofiction, books that twist and blur the boundaries between the novel and the memoir.

Writing about Hedy's last book, The New Yorker's critic, Parle Sagal, called out her work's whimsical self-consciousness and its preoccupation with mysticism, questions of faith, and ethics. To me, Sheila Hedy is one of the most interesting novelists working today. She is ruthlessly contemporary, by which I mean she's not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise. She's constantly trying to figure out

New places fiction can go, new ways that we're using language, new ways that our minds are evolving. Here's Paul Sago.

Her newest book is titled Alphabetical Diaries. She draws from 10 years of her diaries that she kept, and she took sentences, questions, little moments from her diaries, and has woven them into a new text that has all the best characteristics of a diary. It feels very intimate. It feels private. It feels...

charged with all the kinds of questions you can only bring to your diary. And she makes of it a separate kind of novel populated with characters that emerge from her own life. I think even in Hedy's career, which has been marked by so many kinds of formal innovation, it has a freshness and surprise all its own. I think this is your 11th book. Yeah. Right? Alphabetical Diaries is your 11th book. And even by your standards, this one to me felt...

Fresh, daring, risky. Can you tell us what you've done? So it's basically, I took 10 years of my diaries, which I wrote on my computer, and I

put it all into an Excel spreadsheet, and then alphabetized the sentences by, you know, the first letter of the sentence and so on. And yeah, I mean, I think the last 10 years, we're just trying to figure out how, how should this be read? Like, should it be unbearable? You know, like, or should it be kind of welcoming? Like, how much of it is this sort of scientific experiment of what happens? And how much of it should it be like,

novel and kind of pleasurable to read and feel sort of narrative despite the lack of chronology. I was wondering if we could have you read from it for a little bit just to give a sense of, as you say, these entries were often in the purpose of figuring something out. So there are these prickly questions that come lapping at us that you have sort of arranged. But I have something from the tea chapter, but we can read anything that you... Yeah, tea chapter is fine.

Oh, so this is how the tea chapter begins. Terrible day. Texting me pictures and apology. Thank God my youth is ending. That Edie Sedgwick should commit suicide. That face. That feeling I had, that pit of fear that he could not love me, is not a reason to not be with him, but a reason to be with him. That feels right to me, and that's the way I want to be in the world. That gives me hope for things, for everything turning out okay.

That hot summer, with squares of light coming through the leaves and sparkling on the ground. That is because I got up at six this morning. That is being alive. That is how I felt when I was younger, anyway. That is how I spent my days. That is life's activity. That is the only freedom. That is the secret work no one will ever see. That is what Hungarians do, she said. That is what I am here to do. That is what the culture demands of female writers. To be as low as possible. That is what you can learn from writing this book.

I had to keep myself from laughing. It's, it's, um, that last line, can I ask you what you learned from writing this book? Or one of the things, some of the things you learned? Yeah, it's funny. I wasn't sure that I had learned anything. And then, um, a couple months ago, I was writing something and I started to feel really depressed. And I thought, you haven't,

You haven't learned anything from editing this book for 15 years. And then I realized I could let myself write without paying so much attention to chronology and just let my mind sort of skip through time much more nimbly, I guess. And

Yeah, I think that's what I learned. Like you don't actually chronology is not the only thing that keeps a person going from beginning to end. And I think I'd known that before, but I hadn't known it quite this much. And that the way that the mind understands time is not chronological. So without chronology, what are some of the ways that you found yourself thinking about how to get the reader going from beginning to end? What becomes the engine, the sort of momentum in this book?

I think it's more like music. It's more like a rhythm thing.

And I think it's juxtaposition. So yeah, I was really like, oh, if you cut those six sentences and then sentence number one and sentence number seven are beside each other, that creates a really interesting friction. So I think looking forward to the surprise of those juxtapositions maybe. And I don't know, I think like by the end of all my editing, like it had become a world. And so you're sort of in that world and there's like a texture and there's a color to it and there's...

a character. So all the things that I guess are in a normal novel. But I didn't know, like, sometimes I, I tried different things. So sometimes I put all the years into one document. And other times I tried, okay, maybe you do 2005 as one chapter, all in alphabetical order, 2006 as one chapter, all in alphabetical order, 2007. You know, like, there were so many different attempts at, I don't know, what am I trying to even do? There's like this way that you're

that I was trying to figure out what is even the interesting in this. So I want to understand a little bit more about what it felt like to be moving these things around. And, you know, you described it as musical and you described it as the rhythm, but it's a book that reads very well and it has a narrative starts to coalesce, right? So tell us a little bit more about how it started to come together and started to move for you.

Well, I wanted it to. So, yeah. So I... I made it. I made it move. Yeah. I mean, I tried to narrow the number of characters, you know, so that you would get familiar with people. There were certain locations that I left out so that you would feel like...

the world was circumscribed, you know, enough. References to things that only come up once I was less likely to keep in than references to things that come up six or seven times. You know, and then there were certain times in the diary where there would be like some scene described at length. And I

I would opt to have that in the book because you remember as you go through the chapters, oh, right, you're in this place, you're in this place. I wanted it to feel like, because 10 years is a long time, I wanted it to feel like a smaller world than what 10 years actually spans in some way. Did you see, I mean, I know we were speaking about this novel as a novel, which we should, but I'm feeling nosy a little bit. I'm wondering if going back and spending that much time in your diaries showed you something that you didn't

didn't understand or you understand better about some of the events that were that you were writing about or thinking about? I don't know you think every guy that you're with is like so different from every other one and when you see it all like taken apart like this you're just like oh I'm just going through the same thing over and over you know it's like this category of thinking um that actually can very easily be replaced. It's humbling isn't it? Yeah it's it's sort of depressing.

I guess the other thing that was weird is just like, yeah, there's like archetypal people in your life. So there's the, it was very easy to make composite characters because there are certain kinds of people you're drawn to. And if that person falls out of your life, here comes another person that you draw into your life that has the same traits, you know? So it was, that was sort of interesting to see, which makes the people in your life feel like at once more,

essential. Like you need this bossy, whatever, female friend or whatever it is. And also, I don't know, more like people playing like actors in a role or, you know, you cast them in a role, maybe they're not actually bossy, you just make them bossy or, you know, feel that they're bossing you. I don't know. It's strange. Yeah. Lately, when I've been talking to writers of all kinds, I've just

kind of just been asking them the same question. And I'm wondering how you're thinking about the novel now, about having done this experiment. Are there other possibilities of the novel that it's opened up for you? You mentioned chronology, but I'm curious about how it has you thinking about the form. I don't know. I mean, I've been working on this new book for the last two or three years that kind of

that involves these conversations that I've had with this chatbot. And I think working with the diaries, what was nice about it all this time was that it didn't really feel like my voice. Because when you're writing for a diary, it's not like a literary voice. And so you're working with something that's not intended for a book. And there's something fun and refreshing about that. And I think it's fun to find writing that...

shouldn't be in a novel and to figure out, like, can it do the same things that we want writing in novels to do, which is, you know, move us and tell us something new about the world and about ourselves. Yeah, I'm just really tired of my own voice right now. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. WNYC Studios is supported by Rocket Money.

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Very frequently, your novels are described as formally experimental and daring and avant-garde. And I'm curious if this is a conscious strategy, if this is something that you're drawn to when you're putting together a book, or if it's something, these sort of technical risks and formal challenges you set yourself, if it's something that emerges from the story as you begin telling it.

Yeah, it emerges. I mean, I think that's right. Like, except for this Alphabetical Diaries book, which did start off like with a formal idea, this very strict formal idea that I was trying to follow. But no, with all the other books, no, I always, honestly, I always want to write like a straight realist novel. I'm always trying to make something proper, you know, and like the books that I love most, you know,

like crime and punishment or whatever, you know, and a crime and a... But I... It doesn't happen. Because I think I don't notice the same things that those writers that I love notice. I'm impatient with certain things that they were patient with. And so...

The books morph according to all these characteristics, you know, of what are you impatient with? What are you actually curious about? What actually looks beautiful to you on the page? What sounds good to your ear? Like all that changes what the book becomes. Yeah, but I think in my head, I always, when I'm starting a new one, I always think this is going to be, this is going to be something that, yeah.

Yeah, something that I've read and loved. And I just want to sort of make something like that. You once said, and I think this was around the time How Should a Person Be came out, that you were interested in experimenting with the contemporary world.

And when I think of your work, and I think, you know, I mentioned this a little bit earlier about your novels, never feeling nostalgic. It never really feels like you're trying to do Middlemarch again. You know, you're always trying to say, what else can I do with character and scene and dialogue and story?

this portable form and just being in somebody's hands for a while. Yeah. I mean, I'd love to write Middlemarch again. Don't get me wrong. This might be a dare. But I'm wondering if the contemporary in that particular way is still alluring to you? Is something that still feels like something you are interested in meeting? Yeah. I mean, you're...

You're right here. And that's really rare. This moment is, you know, gone now. So what is this moment? I think that that's, it's kind of scary and exciting to be right here. And I guess that's why you're here right now, to document right now, or to look around right now. And it's as interesting as any other time. I just feel like this

with this feeling like everyone who's alive today, we're all here in this moment together and in a hundred years, no one will know what we all know, you know. And so I kind of, yeah, you want to be present for it. It seems special to be alive in a time with other people. That was an amazing answer. Thank you. Oh, thanks for having me. That was so fun.

Sheila Heddy's new book is called Alphabetical Diaries, and she spoke to staff writer Parle Sagal. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for listening. See you next week.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, Kalalia, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, and Louis Mitchell, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, and Alejandra Teket. ♪

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