Poured Over: Sheila Heti on Alphabetical Diaries

By Jenna Seery / February 6, 2024 at 6:00 am

“I’m interested in the limitations of the mind — like that your brain really does only go down so many paths, and then there’s a million paths that for some reason, it never goes down…”

Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries is a memoir in a form all its own. Told in order, sentence by sentence from A to Z, to tell a story of identity and change in a lyrically constructed way. Heti joins us to talk about the inception and writing of this book, intense and purposeful editing, creative process and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.                  

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.        

Featured Books (Episode):
Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti
Pure Colour by Sheila Heti
How Should a Person Be? by Sheila Heti
Ticknor by Sheila Heti

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Sheila Heti has done a very cool thing in her new book. And you know, if you’ve been reading her, she changes it up a little bit book to book and Alphabetical Diaries. I’m in love with this tiny, tiny book that is built out of your literal diaries presented in alphabetical order. And I mean, the first sentence of this book is so good. It’s so good a book about how difficult it is to change why we don’t want to and what is going on in our brain. And I’m just wondering what year that came from, because literally, this is 10 years of your diaries, you throw it all together alphabetically. And we get a really cool book and a really just a cool tour through your head as well. You’ve been living with these for 10 years, you sort of fiddled around with them on a spread, it sounds like a spreadsheet, like you went old school, Excel noodled around made a thing. But I also don’t keep a diary. And I never have. So I don’t really know the first thing about the mechanics beyond some people prefer you know, their phones, some people prefer their laptop, some people prefer paper, and I’m like, I haven’t got the first clue what I would put down in a diary day to day. So that’s kind of where I’m coming from with all of this. But when did you decide to do this? Because I feel like you were doing it concurrently? With at least Pure Colour, if not all of other books?

Sheila Heti

Yes. Well, so I, I’ve always written very intermittently in a diary. I’m not a daily journal keeper or anything like that. It just sort of when there’s a problem, or something I’m trying to remember, or I want to work something through, there’s nobody I can talk to, or there’s nobody who will hear me talk about it anymore. And yeah, so I would say probably the years that I was writing the diaries, which started around 2005, I probably write in the diary like 40 to 30 times a year, like knock that off. And I wrote them on the computer because I write everything on the computer. I just since I was 12, I’ve always only written on a computer can not read my handwriting. And so it wasn’t like I had to type out my diaries into the computer that were already there. So when I thought I want to see what these years of diaries look like in alphabetical order, rather than chronological order, it was like a matter of, you know, Trent sort of putting every sentence on the on its own line in Word, and then importing it all into Excel. And then there’s an A to Zed function like a little button, which basically alphabetized them by first letter, second letter, third letter, fourth letter, and so on. So that was the original template, and then 14 years of editing and thinking about it and wondering like, how do you present a book like this? Do I do 2005 in alphabetical order, and then the next chapter is 2006. And the next chapter is two through seven. I mean, ended up not being that, but I had lots of questions about it, how to present this.

I’m so glad you have those questions, because I really liked the final format. I’m not exactly sure how you chose to edit because I thought at first it was going to be sort of straight alphabetical. Right? And that’s, that’s definitely not, there’s a story arc in each chapter. I flew through this book, and I really, I went into it with no expectations. And I’d seen the pieces you done in the New York Times Magazine, which I don’t know if those were excerpted or if this that was like a different version of what it is. Yeah. And I’d read those, and I quite liked them. But as a whole, this book is so much fun. And it’s so playful. And it’s so smart. And I could not put it down and like I really just want to go back and reread it right now. And I want to give it to everyone I know because I haven’t really experienced something like this structurally. possibly ever. And I’m kind of hard to surprise, like, I read a lot like I’m not easily surprised. And I’m smiling, just thinking about Alphabetical Diaries again, and I’m wondering if it was like that for you. I mean, obviously, you’re known for your humor, and your sort of different approaches to your books. But it feels really playful, even though there is some I mean, there’s some stuff in here where you’re like, Oh, that’s not playful, but the overall effect is…

Yeah, I mean, it was what I would, my boyfriend called it my procrastination project. It was a place of play while I was writing Motherhood and Pure Colour, much more difficult books to write which really called a lot of emotions. This was or a puzzle and editing and something that I could just go to whatever, you know, I wasn’t always sure that this is going to be a book, I thought maybe it’ll be an online project, maybe I won’t publish it at all. Like, it wasn’t always clear what the form would end up being or if it would be for other people at all. So yeah, I liked that it was playful, because it was something that I was playing with.

I’m lifting a line from a New Yorker review, I think, from Pure Colour, but it quoted you talking in another interview. So I note, I don’t know the original source of this, except that to see but talking about wanting to write a book, like it was a Richard Serra sculpture, and I happen to be very fond of that particular form of his where you know, and you can walk into the sculptures. And it’s really kind of terrific. And I’m wondering if you feel like this is that book, if you’ve actually done that thing and created your Serra sculpture with Alphabetical Diaries.

That’s a really nice thing to think about? Yeah, because you are kind of wandering through this structure. It like looks different at different angles, and you get kind of lost it. But then there is a shape. Yeah, I really liked that idea. I mean, thanks.

Well, you did the work. I just get to read it. I mean, I got the I got the absolute fun bits. I was just like, Okay, I mean, I wasn’t walking into it completely blind, I knew sort of what the concept was. I just didn’t know what to expect, because I’m also not necessarily reaching for someone’s diaries first, like, I mean, plenty of writers have had posthumous diaries published and some have had them published while they’re still, that’s not the first thing I’m looking for. I mean, letters sometimes. But I don’t necessarily I was kind of like, Alright, let’s see what happens here. And I do feel like having read very recently to Mother reread motherhood and pure color, and how should a person be? I feel like you were always showing us who you were in the novels, although, can we talk about novel for a second, because it feels like that’s a word that you don’t necessarily use to describe your books. I don’t know the earlier work, at least.

I personally use it. to describe this book too, even though, obviously, in ways, I mean, every sentence was written for a diary, I didn’t change the sentences, I didn’t make anything up. I didn’t write any new sentences. But I wanted it to feel like you’re reading a novel in the sense that there was a flow and there were characters, there was some kind of sense of moving the reader through time, even if strangely, and you know that when you finish it, you haven’t, that you’ve actually had an experience like one continuous experience from beginning to end. So in that sense, I had novels in my head, I definitely didn’t have like writers letters or writer’s diaries, because I don’t find it that interesting, either. But I think they’re not so interesting, because they’re so Ill formed, whereas this was formed the same way a novel would be formed.

Okay. So are you starting with form then always?

In this case? Well, I don’t know if it’s form or if it’s like a constraint or if it’s, but I started with that idea of, what if you alphabetize the sentences, and it was half a million words at first. So now it’s 50,000 words. So it’s a 10th of it is left, which is, which is still a lot, I think.

I’m flipping back and forth a little bit between, you know, sort of the idea of fame and chasing fame as it appears in how should a person be right? And obviously, it’s a piece of fiction, right? I’m not saying this is your personal feeling about chasing fame. But as a writer, you do give up a certain amount of yourself, just no matter what you’re writing, even when you’re not naming a character Sheila, right. I mean, there are pieces of Pure Colour that feel very much like they are taken from your life. And I think you’ve spoken at length about when your father died, and that sort of changed the direction of the novel and whatnot. But why was it really that much of an experiment to take your diaries and put them out and give them new form? I mean, it just, I feel like I knew you kind of already. Even though this is the first time we’re meeting,

To me, the experiment is not being known or not being known the experiment, trying to put a book together. I mean, I don’t really think about whether people know me or not, it’s not really what I’m interested in, like as a question. I’m not like trying to hide but I’m not trying to reveal either it’s just incidental that being known or not known or presumed to be known, or whatever it may be.

Did you learn the thing you’ve set out to learn when you were putting this together? I mean, did you figure out if if you had changed if things were different?

I don’t think there’s as much change as I would have thought. Not that I set out to learn one specific thing, obviously. But I was curious, like, how different is the self that I am today from the self I was 10 years ago? And I think the answer is not very different. But that’s nice. In some sense. It’s kind of reassuring, there’s a lot of work you would have to do if you thought that you could dramatically change yourself. Realize that you actually can’t is a kind of peaceful realization to come to, it’s sort of sweet to have to be yourself. I think when I was younger, I was always like, well, how can I be anything about myself? Obviously, how should a person be is a lot about that desire to like, be anybody else, to be the better version of yourself, or just to be another self who’s actually better than you are? You know, I’ve been, Kate Berlanti did the audiobook, and I’ve been like listening to the audiobook of this book, been driving, which is really strange to hear that. But I love her. She’s such a great comic, and she reads the line so differently than I would. And so many of the lines in them, which a lot of are from, like 2005, 2006 are still sentences that I would write down today, like it’s the same problems, it’s maybe different people that I’m encountering those problems with.

There’s definitely a cast of characters, there’s definitely a set of themes that work their way through, I mean, certainly relationships and money, and what is art? And how do I make art and the wrestling that you do with writing? I’m still sort of sitting with this. You started with half a million words and got it down to 50,000. I’m like that. And granted 14 years is, you know, enough time, I just, that’s a wild amount of cutting.

Motherhood too, is the same, like 1000 words cut down to like 60. Like, I always want to have a huge pile of words. And then. So this was very good, because I didn’t have to come up with the words like there were words were already there.

Do you feel like it was faster to do this than the words were already there?

I mean, I didn’t have to write it. Yeah, I mean, it was written when I started editing. And I didn’t, I wasn’t thinking about it as a book. When I was writing the diaries. I wasn’t thinking this is going to be a booklet. Right. So it was just really an editing project. Yeah, it wasn’t fast.

I know I mentioned this to you before we started taping, but I was like, it’s not really that there were spoilers in alphabetical diaries, but at the same time, this book is just such a joy to read. And it was so surprising and so kind of fun and witty, and a little weird, but also very earnest and kind of open. And you could read it straight through without a doubt. And but part of me also thinks you can sort of pick it up wherever you feel like and just grab a sentence. And I love to the way you were sort of choosing the length of this, now that I know how much cutting happened. It’s like, Oh, wait. So we’ve got some runs, where the sentences are really long. And we’ve got some runs, where the sentences are like three words. And the cadence feels like it really matters. And I’m wondering sort of how much of this came out of you. Not just the editing phase, like I’m clear on the on the cutting and all of that. But were you reading out loud to yourself? Or are you just sort of engaging with what was in front of you on the page and making decisions solely there? Because there’s a clear cadence in each of these chapters?

Yeah, I mean, I was reading out loud in my head, I can hear it without saying it out loud. But yeah, I mean, I was really, I was thinking about it like that, like, what is the rhythm? Because there’s very little that you have to Well, there’s only if you can’t work with Nick with plot then. And like, rhythm is one of the things

because I also, you know, you mentioned talking about making sure that you felt the change in time, the passage of time and whatnot. And that was also really clear. For me as well, like I again, I don’t know exactly when these sentences are written. You’ve given me the window 2005 2006 Beyond that, sort of 10 years, whatever. But the idea that it all comes together as a really clear narrative. When you kind of started a little bit with pick up sticks, in a way, right, like, yeah, it is kind of like playing a game. We’re just

Yeah, truly, I mean, a lot of it was deciding who the characters were going to be what letter a character’s name should start with, because obviously, like the characters, you know, Lars, like all his sentences or our chapter, like, have a lot of sentences are in the P chapter. So like, what name do you want to give this character? It’s just a different way to think about narrative like, which, which boyfriend Do you want to come at the end of the book? Which boyfriend Do you want to come at the beginning of the book? Well, the way to do that is to decide what name to give them. I just had to think about in a completely new way, how to write this book or edit it or whatever. How

much of that there was just deciding who doesn’t make the cut. I mean, don’t you have it sort of idea of?

No, because not real people like, yeah. Okay. So what I did was I, at one point made all the male characters he and all the female characters, she and then I built up characters from whatever sentences I wanted. So that like, like the Pavel character is sort of like for boyfriends in my head, you know, or whatever. Like, they’re all kind of composites. Because I didn’t want to be writing. I didn’t want to be putting anybody into the world. And that way I was then that was one of the other prompts like, how do you publish your diary without telling other people about these people who have been in your life, which I didn’t want to do? I didn’t want to tell them what I thought of them. I didn’t want to tell other people. Anything about anybody?

Can we go back to how should a person be for a second? Because you had active participation from your friends who sort of pop up, right? Like the way the emails worked? In How should a person be and that sort of flipping back and forth, back and forth. It made me think of Beckett, there’s a little bit of this feel of Waiting for Godot, right, this playfulness that pops in those email exchanges, even when they get a little surreal. But I do you feel like your humor anchors me to the work that you’re doing, right? Like even in motherhood, there are a couple of moments where I’m okay. Okay, I see where you’re going and pure color. You’re balancing, humor and grief, kind of thing. But alphabetical diaries is like laugh out loud. there pretty much is a laugh on every single page. And when you were saying, you know, you’re figuring out who the people are going to be, and how I’m going to structure this and everything else. I don’t know, was the humor. Deliberate? Or did it just come out through the whole process of creating the book? Like, did you walk into the saying, I need to be funny in this book, I want this to be the laugh out loud, funny one, or was it just here’s the story?

No, I didn’t go into it saying that. But then you realize, when you’re editing, oh, this is a place where humor, this is a place where this could be funny. I mean, I I’m happy that the book is funny. But I think that that’s, that’s just one of the things I thought it’d be nice to come across. You know, like, it wasn’t the only thing that I was thinking about, but I don’t, but I think it wasn’t intentional, also, but I always want there to be humor, because that’s just such a good part of life. And it’s a funny idea. Like, just the whole idea is kind of weird and funny. And so it would be weird to make this a completely grave sort of result, you know,

but the tension, right between what’s funny, and what’s maybe a little more serious. I do think that tension is part of what I get from reading, regardless of what you’re writing about. I just I feel like that narrative tension is something that I associate pretty strongly with you.

Well, yeah, and I think the best humor is in the places that it’s not supposed to be probably. Like, if you’re expecting a laugh, you’re probably not gonna laugh. What

are you hoping readers discover in alphabetical diaries, or you just want to hand them the Book and be like, I did my thing.

I think it’s an interesting way of thinking about time. And it’s like an interesting portrait of the mind. And it’s, there’s lots of things that I hope people see in it. But there’s not like one specific thing.

Is it possible to surprise yourself though, when you’re working in material that you’d already written?

Yeah, it was very, there’s a lot of surprise to me, because it’s not like I had my diaries memorized, either. Like I was surprised upon sentences that I even I don’t even know why that sentence. Is there a where it came from or why I wrote it, but it works here. Yeah, it’s funny out of context, or it’s strange or interesting.

I mean, for me, alphabetical diaries just read in a way where it’s like, it was really kind of liberating, because as much as you’re talking about form, right, you clearly have an idea as you’re sort of chipping away, right? And making this thing. And the form is so clear that it’s actually it feels like there is no form in a way, right? Like, that sounds like a Zen koan accidentally, but you know, the idea that is that, is it the cup, or is the emptiness in the cup that makes the cup? And it feels to me like, yeah, you could easily call this a novel. But can we talk about how we define novels for a second because obviously, there are pieces of it that are like, purely structural, and we’re talking about time and interiority. And I feel like I’ve seen you talk about your work in lots of different ways. But like, sometimes you’re just like, No, and I know you mentioned this at the top of the show that you’re just like No, no, I use the word novel to describe my books. But I feel like there have been a couple of interviews recently where we were like, no, no, I just want to talk about books like, and you say it actually, in this book, you’re like, Well, I prefer books to novels. And I kind of just want to poke at that idea with you for a second. Because I know there are people who do use the words interchangeably. And that’s fine. And however you need to describe, you know, this thing on paper with pages and what or or some people prefer, audiobooks, and whatnot. But I just want to play with that idea with you for a second, like, what’s the difference? Beyond the technical, mechanical pieces? Do you know what I mean?

I mean, a book, or books or books, I guess. Yeah. A novel and I like the word novel, because it is. It doesn’t leave anything out. Any book could be called a novel, any book that I mean, you can call it a nonfiction book, a novel, you can call a novel, A nonfiction work, but you could. I don’t know. I just think it’s like the broadest genre. But yeah, I think book is an even better and more broad category. I had and I, I don’t find that I, you know, when I’m writing, I’m not really thinking about like, what’s the category of this book? I’m just thinking, how to make it.

But am I right, in remembering that you sort of approach each book, not as a problem to be solved? But it’s more like, Well, what did I learn last time? And how do I strip it down to the studs? And how do I relearn or make this different? Like, it feels like you approach every project differently, that there isn’t just a pattern of, hey, I have an idea I’m gonna run with this, right?

Yeah, I mean, every book is about something different. And I’m at a different stage in my life. And I have different formal curiosities. And but I don’t think that I start out saying, Well, how am I going to make a different book this time? It’s more what am I interested in now? And then the form, find, like, then I slowly find the form for that idea.

So that’s how we get the coin tosses in Motherhood.

Well, the coin tosses, I did all that coin stuff before I knew that I was writing a book called Motherhood. So that was just a way of writing. Talking to these coins, like asking a question, throwing the coins, getting an answer asking you another question that I probably wrote like that for a year without again, without thinking is going to be part of a book, it was just fun, and was helping me continue to like write in dialogue, while being alone. Because I had just finished How should a person be, which was years of talking to friends. And then I didn’t want to still be talking to friends, but I still had this dialogue, impulse. So it was a way of having dialogue without anybody else in the room.

It reads like an exchange on. And actually, you had a story recently in The New Yorker, where it was partially written with an AI bot, named Alice.

Yeah, completely written with…

But it feels like Alice could slide into motherhood as well, like that exchange could be part of motherhood, it could be part of how should a person be like, there are certain things like now I’m looking at how you use dialogue differently. Seeing this threat because also pure color. I think, I guess the dialogue between Mira and her dad more than anything, yeah. And then sort of the way dialog pops here in alphabetical diaries, that and the, the dialogue and the humor are kind of like the two things that I think if I were reading something blind, and someone asked me to guess if it was you, I’d be like, Oh, those would be the markers I could use to figure out that it was easy, because you have a very distinct voice, which I really appreciate. I mean, these four books are sort of the books. Well, the last three, you know, pure color. How should a person be motherhood are sort of the books that people really know you for? I remember Ticknor I read your short story collection ages ago, there’s some books I’m missing. But those were the chairs like, oh, right, Ticknor that it’s been a minute that was 2005. But I feel like people really know you now for this sort of body of work, right? These particular books and alphabetical diaries fits perfectly in with the voice of these other novels, even though they are kind of I mean, didn’t you talk about how should a person be is like, a sort of an experiment to see if you could write a novel with more than one author?

I don’t know. I mean, there’s things that I was playing around with there, but I want to say because you read Ticknor, which is not as common when I was working on alphabetical diaries. I was thinking of Tichenor like, oh, like you’re inside somebody’s head. In a really particular kind of neurotic, repetitive, obsessive way for throughout the whole book, so I kind of see this as, like, closer to Tichenor than Okay, books. For those reasons, this circling, like at one point, this alphabetical diaries was called canals. Because I had this idea of like, okay, your brain just goes down certain paths, and it like is always going down those same paths, like it’s like rats, you know, like, or group a record, like I was thinking about, that’s what this book was about, for me for a long time, which is what Ticknor is about as well. So I’m interested in the, like, the limitations of the mind like that your brain really does only go down so many paths. And then there’s a million paths that for some reason, it never goes down, like, and that’s why I like playing with the coins. Because, you know, you ask it a question, and it says no, and then you ask another question says no, and You Your brain is forced to go down new paths. There’s always this like frustration of like, Why does my brain only think about things in one way? But then in terms of like, representing it, like in a book like this? One way, Enos of it, like, it’s kind of interesting. Like, it’s something about us that it’s like, Why do I always go to the same restaurant and order the same thing, like there’s a million restaurants in my city, and in any restaurant, there’s a million other items, but there’s this like, like desire to repeat in us, even my dog, I’m just looking at my dog right now. And we take a walk, like he wants to walk the same path. Right? You know, and I think that this book is like a lot about that. Like, why am I walking this path over and over again, over 10 years over this? And still today?

I mean, it feels to me having read of medical diaries that your everything feeds back into your art, right? Like, yeah, you’re walking the same path over and over again. But no matter what, we always come back to the work. And I think the way you interrogate yourself and I don’t mean interrogate and in like an aggressive, weird way or anything like that, but just in the sense of what you just described, right, and walking around the same path and the same path on the same path. I’m like, you have it, it seems to me that you’re asking these questions and doing these things in service of creating art. I didn’t feel like alphabetical diaries was neurotic I felt like you were working through.

It’s less problem, right? Because I am a bit older. So I think it is a little less and you know, the character isn’t, it isn’t as neurotic but. But I just mean more like, you get fixated on things. And you hold on to problems, and you return to the same problems over and over again, and maybe in slightly new ways. But like variations on a on a problem rather than Well, here’s this completely new problem. But you know, I mean, yeah, I think with all the books, there’s this question of like, the art and how do you make a book and how do you write a book and part of the book is always about writing the book. And same with this one, obviously. So yeah, there is there’s a way in which there’s this like, like, cool the center, there’s like a gravitational force. Like, if I didn’t have these books to write. Yeah, what would I be thinking about what I’d be thinking about completely different things, living in a completely different way? I mean, I don’t Yeah, probably.

I think you obviously found your form. But I sort of feel like you’re one of those people who would have found a way to make the thing, because it’s just, it’s in your it’s just part of who you are. I don’t know. Am I wrong about that?

I mean, I had trouble with plays. I think I’m, I’m glad that I switched over to books, because I think I think it’d be easy to get discouraged. doing theater in a way that I’ve never felt with books. I think most writers figure out what their form is, I tried to write a movie at one point, it was a complete disaster. Like, that’s really not my form, like,

Can we talk about literary influences for a second? I mean, you’ve talked about Henry Miller, which I can totally see. But then you’re also sort of wrestling with the modernists a little bit you’re just like, well do I have to be in conversation with and by the modernist obviously, I’m talking James Joyce, you know, Virginia Woolf, sort of who we think of modern canon, in a way, and yet, there is a little bit of there. I mean, I sort of feel like there’s a little bit of wolf sort of floating around in the background of what you do.

I think I read her much earlier than Virginia Woolf and just was like, Oh, you can do you can play with language in this way, or, you know, you can make sense and not make sense and it can just be about the music of the sentences. And I think she’s really important and some of the more experimental contemporary writers too, like, Kenneth Goldsmith wrote a book called soliloquy, like he recorded himself for a full week. Everything he said it was like in the 90s so he wore this like he had these headphones around his neck, and every and then he transcribed everything he said in that whole week. And it was seven chapters, every chapter was a day. And there’s no stage directions. There’s no other people’s speech, no one knew that he was recording. And the book is, you know, this thick, it’s unreadable, but and really banal and really gossipy and funny. And I think that book more than any other book was an inspiration for this one. Okay.

That’s not at all what I expected. But okay. No, I just, I love the idea that we can pull from different places in different moments. And you know, you’re just going to find the inspiration, kind of where you need it.

Mm hmm.

And now I really want to read that. And I’m just like, Okay, do I have time to add?

You can’t really read it, you know, you, that’s a book you have to dip in and out of, and it’s out of print. But now the PDF is online, which is great, because it wasn’t for many years. But it’s, it’s not really even in a book, it’s more just like proof that we speak, you know, it’s like a, it’s a conceptual art, it’s not really a novel in it. Or, if it is, it’s one of the most unreadable ones. And I should actually read it probably beginning to end. That would be interesting. Maybe that will be my reward for being done this book.

Well, I assume you’re working on a new thing, though. I mean, it seems to me that you always kind of have multiple projects going, or,

yeah, I’m working on this sort of this AI ish book that the New Yorker story is kind of part of…

The way you sort of mix philosophy and fiction, and story and narrative. Together. I’m quoting you for a second from a different interview, I believe there’s a platonic ideal for every book that’s written that there’s a perfect version of the book somewhere in the ether. And my job is to find that book through my editing. And you have sort of hit on this a little bit. You genuinely create the thing through the edit. Is that really what you’ve been saying? Yeah, not just that, I mean, not just this book. I mean, going back to Ticknor, going back to the short stories going back to them?

Yeah, that’s the only way I know how to do it. I mean, there has to be like, 10 times more written that is published, because, yeah, cuz I don’t really know what the book is until I start looking at all the material that I’ve collected. And then I can start seeing well, what am I actually interested in? Like, what have I been been writing about? What do all these pieces have to do with each other, and the book goes through so many versions and parts fall away, but then parts come back again. And it’s like, if you make like 100 versions of a book, there’ll be certain passages that appear in every version of that book. And those are the essential passages because it can apply to any framing that that book takes. So that’s sort of how I, organically over time, find what are the important parts to keep in the final book? And then it’s sort of a matter of, yeah, well, how do you draw a reader through the experience? What did you start with what you do end with? Yeah, and what goes up against each other nicely, like, in an interesting way, like the crease is kind of friction, interesting. Friction,

can we go back to pure color for a second time, because one of the things I love about that book is you might get a chapter that’s sort of, you know, six pages, you might get a chapter, that’s a paragraph. And so when you’re creating something like pure color, right, and you know, we’re bouncing between what might be considered familiar territory, and then we get a little more sort of into slightly wilder experience, right? So you’ve got the the original material, how many words do you think you had when you first sat down with pure color before you really started to edit it down?

Pure Colour was actually kind of different. That was the one inquiry like that, okay. A guy had a whole draft that I threw out, but it wasn’t compiling tons of material and then cutting it in the same way. It was actually really hard to get anything written for that book. It was sort of the opposite of like, how am I going to write anything? Like, how am I gonna write one paragraph? Yeah, it was actually the only book that had the completely opposite sort of process.

Oh, wow. Okay. Because it really it feels very, very different. Yeah. Yeah. From any of the other books. And partially that is structure. I mean, it was, I was very pleasantly surprised because I do as a reader, I like to have a rhythm in the chat like I, I appreciate it when chapters can be a little shorter, or at least varied in length. It just, it keeps me thinking about the material in a different way. Whereas you know, sometimes you get a book and the chapters are drawn out, drawn out and then you’re sort of like, well, can I and I just I do appreciate chapter breaks that are done. in a way, that I’m not left to assume anything simply because I’m at a break. And given the different storylines that you’re pulling through, and I’m dancing a little bit around pure color, because I think there’s a lot of very fun exploration that happens. I think there’s a lot of opportunity for surprise, and engaging with the story in a way that some folks might not have read a review of, and I don’t want to spoil it for them. Yeah, I do think that you should meet Mara and hang out with her and go from there. That’s what I think. And the package is gorgeous. Yeah. Inspired by an Alex Katz painting, right?

It actually is an Ellsworth Kelly painting. But not Kim did the cover and she did the cover of the alphabetical diary. Oh, yeah. She’s an Aries as well. And she’s the she’s the best. I mean, I think she made them kind of companions of each other conceptually. Like, they both have the same background. And it works.

Yeah, it really works. And I do I think they’re in commerce in the way sort of, how should a person be in motherhood are in conversation in a way it certainly Pure Colour and Alphabetical Diaries feel like they’re in conversation?

How so?

For me, partially motherhood and how should a person be feel very much like coming of age stars, I think we need to stop limiting coming of age stories to, you know, a teenager or 20, something like always coming up coming of age moment when you’re 60. Right. All right. Just stylistically to like the coin flip piece. And like the email, there’s, there’s some stylistic choices that flow through both books that make me feel like I’m in a particular orbit, right, like I’m in a world, and that I know who these people are. And these people would know each other in a way, right? For pure color and alphabetical diaries, I feel like it’s a little more idea driven. And the character not that the character is an afterthought. Please don’t I don’t mean that at all, because the characters are clear in both books. But it is more about the sentences, I think in both pure color and alphabetical diaries than it is necessarily about the characters. But the way you structure both books, you keep us moving forward, or at least it kept me moving forwards or both. And it was partially, the way the chapters are designed. It was partially where you’d hit a crescendo in a longer chapter, and I’d be like, oh, right, okay. And it just the ground, never was quite level in either pure color, alphabetical gyres, which I really like, I just want it to be in the books, and I wanted to be following the story wherever it took me. And as we both know, there’s some stuff that happens in pure color, where I’m like, Oh, hi. Yeah. Okay. Here we are. And there were also recognizably some trademarks, like the dialogue again, and this and the humor and whatnot. But you do some stuff in both of these books that I wouldn’t have necessarily expected. After reading, the earlier ones, and Ticknor, I do see the direct line between Ticknor and an alphabetical diaries, but it has really been a minute, since I’ve read. How much of your own work though, informs you were interviews editor at the believer for a really long time, and you did some great work there. But how much of sort of knowing your own theories and feelings about the creation of art drove those interviews? Like how do you ever separate yourself? From the work?

Yeah, I mean, you, you can’t make it otherwise, I don’t think. But I think like when I was doing those interviews, I was much younger. And I really was like trying to ask every artist I was interested in like, how do you make work and trying to learn from everybody that I was interviewing, like, I had such a need to talk to these people. But then in the editing, I always thought of it as like a little play. Like I was always trying to make it. I did so much again, rearranging and cutting and structuring and forming like it was never, I think a lot of times when you see a q&a online now it’s just as it was spoken, as it was conducted. And this has so much. I was always interested in making like an arc and making Where do you want to start? Where do you want to end? And with a believer there was always like, sections. So each little section would have its own arc and its own special end. And yeah, it was really fun to do.

I loved reading those interviews, because again, they were always a little surprising, a little different. They were just fun. And again, more an experience, right? Like this is something you were talking about earlier. In this episode is like making an experience I think that’s really important. There are the books that you read. And then there are the books that you experience. Right. And that’s different for everyone. But I love the idea. And I know that when I feel like I’m deep in a book, right, and the other thing is alphabetical diaries is so little. It’s not that it’s it hasn’t been 13 pages, but it’s,

I think that’s a very good way.

It’s a very good, I’m right there with you. It’s a great like, but it is also like, there’s a lot here. And there’s also some whitespace. And but for me, I was so deep in the experience, and a little I don’t know, gleeful I just I was giddy as I was reading it. And just because I was like, where are we going next? What is happening here? I will clearly follow you anywhere. And then occasionally, yeah, you pop up with something. And I’m like, Oh, she’s working something out here. But worked out. I hope what I hope you saw whatever you wanted to see on the other side of this, but just the way you put this book together, it’s just wild. To me. It is so much fun. It’s so much fun. And I don’t think I’ve really ever experienced something quite like this. You know, the one thing I’m hoping people really understand about this about alphabetical diaries. It’s really accessible. It’s really fun. It’s really bouncy. It’s really It’s exactly the kind of thing you’d want to sort of keep in your bag. And you can just pop it open whenever I know that feels right to you.

I mean, I like a book that you can open anytime at any page. I mean, I meant it to be read beginning to end and like you said earlier also jump around in because you can. I wanted the book to be a pleasure.

It definitely is. It really, really is. Sheila Heti, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Alphabetical Diaries is out. Now if you haven’t read Motherhood, if you haven’t read Pure Colour. If you haven’t read, How Should a Person Beplease go back and find those, Ticknor too. There’s also the story collection. There’s so much great, great stuff. Great fun stuff but start with Alphabetical Diaries. Sheila, thank you so much again.