Powerful and intimate ... The book is made up of Heti’s frank, funny, filthy and casually philosophical diaries, 10 years of them ... The effect is riveting ... Heti is wrestling openly with the things that matter.
The game that is Alphabetical Diaries has clear rules but no clear objective. The structure is strict, the substance almost uniformly enigmatic ... Never crystallizes into a narrative, but it does induce us to eavesdrop on ourselves ... It is certainly impressive and engrossing to watch Heti navigate the obstacles she has set for herself, the way it is impressive to watch athletes leap over hurdles or savants wrestle Rubik’s Cubes. But does the skill involved in an especially creative escape vindicate the construction of the labyrinth? ... The results are unsatisfying for the same reason that text manufactured by AI is ... We are humans, and we want to be addressed not by alphabetization but by one of our best living authors: by the sparkling Sheila Heti.
Vacillating between the mundane, the shocking, and the aphoristic, Alphabetical Diaries constantly drew me into its gravitational pull ... Though mundanity is a primary focus...Alphabetical Diaries achieves something more sacred and less performative ... A pointillist portrait of the diary itself, a text that is more like a shadow cast by this woman, not the woman herself.
The writer’s curated diaries articulate daily life’s ordinary and routine melodramas ... Heti is a writer devoted to grand ideas. Each of the stories she creates carves into the philosophical and attempts to extract the truth—or better yet the many truths about reality and how to live within it. Her sentences are earnest and her gaze is obsessive ... These entries cover a wide spectrum of emotion and experience ... This acute focus on Heti’s self, on all her quirks and neuroses, and trying to work through them, ultimately evolves from being a fascinating collage of selves to an obsessive examination of self-improvement, which is to say it’s dazzling at first, but inevitably bland and predictable.
The book is boring. Sometimes. It’s also thrilling, very funny, often filthy, and a surprisingly powerful weapon against loneliness, at least for this reader. How it achieves all this has to do with the sentences themselves, but even more than that with the unlikelihood of their arrangement; it’s the sentences’ crackpot proximity to one another that makes them sing (admittedly a very odd song) ... Heti’s structure allows her to represent the mind wandering; but also the way it loops and doubles back on itself, reworking over and over the same problems ... Ends up, I think, in truly surprising territory.
It may sound self-indulgent, but reading Alphabetical Diaries is more fun than it sounds. Heti is amusingly self-effacing...and wise ... The alphabetised sentences give the book momentum and entertaining accidents of language create intriguing micro-stories on every page ... As soon as you are becoming engrossed in one idea, the focus shifts abruptly and the challenge is for Heti to keep the reader engaged ... It will not be for everyone, but readers who enjoy Heti’s fiction should be enthralled.
Perhaps the most straightforward and enjoyable of her oeuvre ... Heti never misses an opportunity to make fortuitous play between chance and meaning. The randomization of the sentences is immediately compelling, trained as so many of us are to the disjointed syncopation of social media and text messages ... The diary brought me into a rapid felt intimacy with Heti ... It is a tidy little book, and the fun that reading it affords is a credit to the author’s compositional skills.
Playful yet disciplined ... This will be a particularly suitable offering for readers who enjoy the intimacy of memoir but wish to delve into more experimental work.
One may question, perhaps, whether the rewards of this book justify its demands, since what we can glean of Heti’s inner life finally seems rather prosaic, no matter the innovative arrangement of its expression. An unusual and sometimes humorous arrangement of self-reflections.
