Alphabetical Diaries

Sheila Heti collected 500,000 sentences from a decade’s worth of journals, put them in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. After extensive edits and cuts, in a process of accumulation and connection, Alphabetical Diaries is the result.

In this intimate archive and inventive chronicle of life and living, Sheila thinks about friends, lovers, work, and sex; how thinking about sex is distracting her from work; where she should live and whom to love; and what writing means to her and why it’s the only thing that matters. Here, the self–constructed by itself–emerges in a new way, in a project that is alive, boundless, captivating.