When you first open a book, you might skip over the copyright page because it’s not the reason you bought the book. It’s information that has to be there, but it doesn’t always add something to your experience of reading. I usually skip over it, too. But, when I cracked open Alphabetical Diaries for the first time, I wanted to check the publication date. It matched what I expected, but I noticed something else interesting. In the genre section, the Library of Congress indicated this text is classified as experimental. This term is not one I usually see affixed to the kinds of books I like to read, or, for that matter, the music I listen to most of the time. So, it was kind of funny to me (and likely only me) that I enjoyed reading this book while taking in the sounds of the most recent GOGO PENGUIN and NALA SINEPHRO albums. Am I learning how to like jazz now that I’m in my 40s? Should I try to read Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler again? Do I need to trade black coffee for green tea? Who am I?
If you’re not familiar, the experimental part of this book involves Heti taking a decade worth of diary entries, typing them into a spreadsheet one sentence at a time, and then alphabetizing them based on the initial word of each sentence. The approximately 60,00 words in these pages represent about 12 percent of the actual content of her diary. So, although you are reading her diary, you’re not reading the entries in order, nor are they present in their entirety. Still, Heti’s skill at writing comes through not only in the short form of each sentence but in the larger motifs that appear throughout the text as a whole. There is not a story here but you will get glimpses of narratives.
The initial cleverness of the idea behind this text results in such interesting pairings of sentences that may never have been slapped together before in the original text. After about 20 pages of reading, I realized I needed to stop dog-earing the parts I wanted to read again because I was eventually going to fold down the corners of the entire book. On each spread, you will be struck by the placement of at least two or three sentences that flow together so fluidly that you will wonder whether they had kept their original running order or whether Heti strategically and thoughtfully placed them in sequence because of the resulting contrast or coalescence. This is about the point in a review where I like to bring in a direct quotation of the author’s work. I can’t bring myself to do that with Alphabetical Diaries because there are too many wonderful examples that I can’t possibly choose just one. Suffice it to say that you will be entertained as you read.
As you press on through the book, you will meet a few people in Heti’s life. An index of their importance to her (at least as revealed in her diary) is how many sentences begin with their name. Both Pavel and Lars seemed to be important, so in the P and L chapters, you will have a few pages’ worth of sentences beginning with each man’s name. Piper and Mom feature less frequently as sentence starters, but they still appear frequently enough elsewhere in the text. You’ll also be unsurprised that the longest chapter is I, which has a separate section devoted to words beginning with only that letter. It makes sense that the first-person singular pronoun begins most sentences in this book; it’s a diary. Who else could be more important in such a text?
If you hadn’t already had the thought by the time you reached that chapter, then you might at that point start wondering what other words or sections or letters might have the most (or the least) number of sentences. There is only one sentence for Q and for Z, while V is only present through sentences about Vig, who does not show up frequently otherwise. X is entirely absent. There are plenty of sentences with the interrogative words (who, what, where, when, why) as a whole, though only one with where. Most of the when sentences she has selected are not questions, but are adverbial clauses introducing another idea. I could go on categorizing these smaller trends in the text, but I think you get the point. This book is as fun to think about as it is to read. And, because there’s not a true narrative through line (as in a novel) or a theoretical frame or political explanation to take away (as in a philosophical or historical text), the joy of rereading it is evident. I wonder which sentences will stand out to me next time.
YOU MAY ALSO ENJOY THESE REVIEWS:
The reviewer was clearly engaged by the nature of this experimental book, as evidenced by the thorough description of the format, the benefits of the format's creativity, and the enthusiasm for future reads. I would look forward to future reviews because two questions came to mind as I was reading this: 1) what is the reviewer's own personal history with Diaries or Journaling and 2) does this format make it any easier to re-read a diary or journal because usually the act of doing so is quite cringe! I myself have only journaled for maybe 9 total days of my adult life. It was a practice that at one time I thought Very Crucial to being a Thinking Person, but I could never sustain the activity. That being said, when I have gone back to re-read, I can barely believe that the melodrama is even real. Good riddance! But maybe if I alphabetized the sentences and printed the best ones I would feel differently!
ReplyDeleteIt should come as no surprise that I have been journaling on and off since I was a teenager.
DeleteThis text is less of a look into Heti's life as it is a remix of the same. The procedural organization and culling has made the quotidian details of her life into a new kind of writing.
Writing itself is therapeutic. Where some people can calm their thoughts via meditation, I find writing to have the same effect. The process reminds me of a comment a friend's dad made when watching a TV show about dream interpretation. (He is a clinical psychologist.) The TV presenter was going on about the importance of certain symbols or events in dreams when my friend's dad cut in with "This is BULLSHIT! Dreams are your mind going doo-doo!" So just as dreams are our minds clearing out waste, writing can serve the same purpose. What better way to see growth and change over time than to see that the day's melodrama, waste, or residue does not seem so pressing weeks later than by committing it to the page?