I loved Sheila Heti's last several books, so I read this one early. I also read it cold, without reading anything about it. I love her ability to completely surprise me, even as someone who follows her work, I had no idea to expect this. And I loved it from the first sentence on. The sentences int he diary are organized alphabetically. And the curation (however much was the writer's hand, however much was serendipity wisely left by her) is fantastic. The very beginning of the book read to me like a wondering definition of the project and the book, a wonderful fresh building up on a theme that is visited in different ways in other books by Heti . Since I started with the audio book (which is also excellent), I didn't know straight away from that they were precisely alphabetical, and I still thought the beginning was magical. There are many very things done by the organizing principle of this book. Some examples: a wonderful defamiliarization; the anaphoric repetition of beginnings creates this enchantment of sound and rhythm (I recommend listening to the audio book too to amplify that effect); the book ends up making something very interesting with time, it becomes more like a dimension since things are not lineary presented. You hear about a break up and you hear about the beginning and middle of relationships, and it begins to feel as present, past and future are all there at the same time. It's really cool.

Thank you Farrar, Straus and Giroux for an ARC for an honest review

Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the audiobook ARC!

If nothing else, Alphabetical Diaries is one of the most innovative books I've ever read. The idea is simple: take a diary, chop it up into individual sentences, reorder the sentences alphabetically. The crazy thing is how often some semblance of a cohesive story kind of takes shape! Pretty interesting concept.

There’s something so magical about Alphabetical Diaries. The way Sheila Heti reorganizes 10 years' worth of diary entries creates a sort of found poetry. It’s fascinating hearing the contradictions, changes, and growth laid flat. This is most evident in entries that give us multiple sentences in a row starting with the same person. It’s so funny hearing how intelligent and insightful is only to later hear Heti discover their flaws.

Another favorite part was in the “I just want…” section because of course it’s never all we want. But in the moment it feels so true.

It feels like there’s a wink and a nod in the way which sentence follows which. Of course, it’s a coincidence that the letters lined up just so. But that’s where the magic of Alphabetical Diaries lies. I love that we don’t get the full picture of how everything fits together, but we still get a feel for Heti’s life over several years.

Kate Berlant does a magnificent job narrating as well. It made the prose come alive and helped ground the emotional changes sentence by sentence.

Alphabetical Diaries was very interesting, I was concerned I wouldn't like the premise, but it was enjoyable. I also liked the audio narrator. I would read more from Heti.

~ARC provided by NetGalley~

Going into the "Alphabetical Diaries," I only knew it was a nonfiction by Sheila Heti, one of my favorite writers. I started and stopped several times with the digital version as well as with the audiobook. Something just didn't click at first, but I wanted to persist because of how highly anticipated this title is. However, after watching Sheila Heti on the Reading the Room podcast, I feel like knowing the context really helped me understand what was going on. To create this book, Heti alphabetized her diary entries over the last ten years. As I read, I found myself returning to the idea behind the organization. With each lettered chapter, I would notice when the sentences got closer to the end of the alphabetical order. I also enjoyed getting to know the different characters in Heti's life as they popped up in different places or got their time to shine at the start of several sentences. But the most striking part for me was the intimacy and worries that Heti had, obviously over many years of her life, and how much they seemed to be plucked from my own journals. If you too are a dedicated personal writer, I am sure that pieces and sentiments from Heti's work will shine for you.

If you're thinking about picking this up, I highly recommend doing a physical copy. The audiobook simply did not work for me, and while I read a digital copy in the end, I wish I had the actual book to take notes, highlight key sentences, and annotate.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advance listening copy of this memoir.

This is a book that I expected to enjoy, but just found confusing. I wondered if only a very
established writer could publish a work like this with an traditional publishing house.

I so enjoyed reading "Motherhood" and really wanted to try this book, but I think I will investigate her backlist next.

I generally enjoy memoirs, but I prefer a more straightforward approach. This style did not engage me.

The narrator Kate Berlant was fine. It was just an odd format for a memoir.

Sheila takes diary entries sprawling a decade of her life and arranges her thoughts alphabetically, presenting us dear readers with such a fascinating and unique narrative structure. Some ranting, venting, philosophical , anxiety ridden moments , extremely confessional, dizzying entries , passages on love and longing and sex and desire for both genders. This is something I can absolutely see myself returning to and dipping in/ out of. It was fun to see the threads and themes, and she would often mention someone by name or sometimes just pronouns and we wouldn’t be able to piece together the story until many letters later, or sometimes not at all.

In one sense, Alphabetical Diaries is exactly as the blurb describes. Heti has taken ten years of journal entries from her young adulthood and organized the sentences alphabetically. This sounds disjointed, and it is, but the arrangement also allows patterns to emerge. We can see the young writer as she navigates her early career and her preoccupation with men and romantic relationships. I had no idea what to expect going into this book, but I really quite enjoyed it.

Really enjoyed the formatting of this book — diary entries spanning a 10-year-old period, presented in alphabetical order — it kept me more engaged than a traditional memoir would have. But because of the alphabetical formatting, I was also confused and found myself a bit lost a few times throughout the book. However, loved the author’s voice and would definitely be into reading more from her in the future. (Thanks, Macmillan Audio and NetGalley, for the audiobook ARC in exchange for an honest review.)

I love Heti and there was so much in this book I liked. I never know what to expect from Heti and this book was no exception. A smidge too disjoint for my taste. I will return to this author again though.

Alphabetical Diaries was everything I thought Pure Colour was going to be. A memoir told over 10 years and from A to Z; Heti is raw, honest and crass in a way that I think will be relatable to women in their 20's as they hurtle towards their 30's feeling a little lost and not fitting into the mold and expectation society expects of women.

Since I read Motherhood when it first came out, the struggle Heti talks about writing her first novel I think I need to reread it now.

Overall, I am not ready to write of Sheila Heti yet, this was a good memoir and I know there is an audience that will resonate with it.

Innovative and intimate, Alphabetical diaries is a collection of 10 years worth of Sheila Heti's most personal thoughts. Organized in an innovative, stream of consciousness-style prose that gathers around letters of the alphabet rather than chronologically, Heti explores themes like the meaning of art, her purpose as a writer, the nature of her relationships and all the unnecessary things she spends money on. It can be both claustrophobic and disorienting to stay with Heti has she jumps between disparate times and ideas, the sentiments and patters across each letter are familiar and specific. The narration is wonderful however this is the first audio I can remember being aware of jumping from one recording session to the next which took me out of the book.

Title and Author: Alphabet Diaries by Sheila Heti
Overall Grade: C+
Narration: C
Depth and Topics covered: B
Writing: C (hard to judge since it was alphabetized journal sentences, and this did not work for me to follow the author's life)
Best Aspect: The original idea of alphabetizing a journal.
Worst Aspect: The narrator made me often feel this was a dramatic novel and the fact the format didn’t allow me to follow the stories accurately.

"How much pleasure there is in just sitting around, writing, eating and reading"

I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this audiobook, but what followed was kind of a weird heartwarming magic. Knowing nothing about this author or her life, it was equally confusing and fun trying to piece together the different interwoven storylines and characters of this autobiographical work. Because the sentences are taken away from the paragraphs they were written in, you almost have to treat each sentence as its own story and that's so cool to me. My favorites were when there were no names in back-to-back sentences that would be so jarringly different, so Heti would go from "He must have no idea how differently this relationship is sitting in me, or how differently it's directing me" then the next line is like "He is very much blocked" and it makes you think about if it's the same person or not. And the coolest part is we'll never know. Kate Berlant's narration really added to my enjoyment of these diary entries. This was the first audiobook I've listened to where I want to read it again in print! Good thing "Alphabetical Diaries" releases tomorrow (February 6th). I would recommend this to anyone who's in their "finding beauty in the little things" era. This is one I can see myself coming back to over and over.

(Thank you to Net Galley, Sheila Heti and Macmillan Audio for sending me the audiobook to review. All thoughts are my own.)

I’ve read Pure Colour twice and then last month reread it again after reading Alphabetical Diaries and now Sheila Heti is one of my fave authors. I first read this advance copy in December and then reread it on audio last month and it’s definitely a book I will reread again. This book is a collection of Heti’s thoughts over ten years arranged alphabetically. I loved the creativeness in this book! These thoughts really stood out to me:

“How much pleasure there is in just sitting around, writing, eating and reading.”
“… it gives me pleasure to eat food I find good, and to eat all day long, and it gives me pleasure to sit comfortably in a chair.”
“…read the books you need to read”

And especially these three thoughts from the R chapter:
“Read a lot of books.”
“Read all day.”
“Really I’m just spending all of my money on books.”

I loved the honesty, joy, desperation and uniquely brilliant writing in this book! Definitely one of my fave 2024 releases!

I’m drawn to books with unusual structures, and Sheila Heti’s “Alphabetical Diaries” has to be one of the most audacious I’ve ever encountered: Heti feeds a decade’s worth of her diaries into Excel and alphabetizes the sentences to create this wholly original book. As the reader makes their way through the alphabet of seemingly disconnected sentences, narrative themes of Heti’s life begin to emerge—romantic relationships, professional insecurity, financial instability—with the highs in each area often ending up followed immediately by the lows because of the laws of alphabetization, but also as they often do in a person’s life, particularly during the unsettled decade of their 20s. (“Stay away from Lars,” for example, is succeeded by “Stay here, Lars told me, and it turned me on and I stayed” and “The book feels arid and empty to me now, like a shriveled arm that can’t raise itself to shake your hand” comes right before “The book is beautiful and practically perfect.”) Other juxtapositions feel almost poignantly human, as when the weighty “Perhaps it’s true what they say about the planet heating up—I mean, it’s quite obviously true” is followed by the more frivolous “Perhaps lighten my hair a bit.” By the time I got to “T” and was reading all the sentences starting with “Then,” I could almost believe “Alphabetical Diaries” was a conventional episodic narrative. But that would be unfair to Heti and to this daring and genre-stretching book. (Note: I could probably have done without many of the sentences that somewhat graphically recounted Heti’s sexual encounters, but I give her full credit for her honesty in not self-censoring her diaries. The book is more authentic because of that, even if somewhat uncomfortable at times for this reader.)

Many thanks to NetGalley and to Macmillan Audio for providing me with an audio ARC of this title in return for my honest review.

The premise of ALPHABETICAL DIARIES is revelatory -- Sheila Heti takes her diary across several years (from her late twenties to early thirties) and breaks it up into sentences/fragments. Then she alphabetizes it all to form a new creation.

The outcome leads to both more privacy in some situations (Heti doesn't shy away from discussing sexual encounters, so pronouns out of context can remove identifying features). Additionally, we can gain more insight and understanding through this process: when sentences start with the same individual, we find a host of descriptors: perhaps a friend is brilliant, gifted, wonderful, but also ineffective and a poser. She loves a partner, adores them, then judges them and finds fault. We see the evolution of situations play out, but we can also find fragments sprinkled throughout and wonder if they tie together ("Is this related to that other scene?").

I couldn't help but reflect on my initial, obnoxious response when I first went to a modern art gallery. I walked away from multiple exhibits going, "I could make that. Therefore, it's not art." One of my artist sisters gently but pointedly put me in my place, informing me that sure, while I could do something like that, this person was the first; they saw the potential and the art in something, so they made it happen and invited us to consider something in a new light, to see it as art.

Heti took a gamble on this exercise, and it is a successful, interesting venture. I'd be interested in hearing more from her about this project; did she do any editing of her entries? When did this idea occur to her? Was it while she was still writing in her diary? I can't help but wonder if she found herself trying to alter the words that began her sentences to get more range, and whether there were there any topics too sacred or private that were excluded.

The audiobook is narrated by Kate Berlant; she does a notable job adding nuance and energy into the disparate parts. While Berlant is an adept reader and I have no complaints or criticisms on her performance, I might suggest those intrigued with this title to encounter it in its print or digital medium, simply so they can soak it in and more easily return to various sections of the book.

(I received a digital ALC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)

I think the idea behind this collection was interesting, but it didn't quite nail the landing for me. This author has been hit or miss for me in the past and I just htink this one was a miss, unfortunately.

I really didn't think this was going to work but somehow it does? Heti took her diary entries that span 10 years and she arranged the sentences in alphabetical order. You can see threads throughout each letter and sort of piece things together. But it's like a performance art piece. We are zooming in so far that you can only make out some words, a sentence here and there, but you can't see the whole. The whole is blurry. It leaves it up to the reader to make sense of it all. I feel like each reader may get very different things from this book. There were some sentences I wanted to read multiple times because they were so perfect. And then there were some that jumped right into the next (that may have been written many years apart) that just worked together. I really enjoyed this but I'm still surprised that it worked.

I chose to request this audio book primarily because I am a huge Kate Berlant fan and I was thrilled to see her stepping into the world of narration. She did an excellent job with this material and I would put this in the category of a performance art piece, more so even than an audiobook. For me it landed somewhere between a poetry reading and a one woman show, and I think listeners (and readers) should approach this as an experience versus a novel or a book to be simply read.