How to Be an Author and a Character Simultaneously
Sheila Heti | Alphabetical Diaries | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | February 2024 | 216 Pages
It feels almost pro forma for any piece on Sheila Heti to start with some gesture toward understanding what “autofiction” is. Never mind that Heti herself dislikes the term, as do most writers tarred with the same brush. And never mind that nothing new ever seems to come of it. We still replay the same irritating questions again and again with the pleasure of a serial killer returning to the scene of the crime. We ask: is it memoir? Metafiction? Autobiographical fiction? Creative nonfiction—whatever that is? The last refuge of disillusioned MFA students? Or is it simply a marketing term?
Heti has only reconciled herself to the term via the latter, telling an interviewer in 2022 that “it’s a useful term because it helps people’s expectations of the book.” Still, you sense her exhaustion with being asked about it when she follows up with: “I just call it fiction, though. All writers use their lives. Look at Proust—it’s all fucking autofiction.” And it’s a well-earned exhaustion too—an interview from 2012 finds her hitting the same marks:
People keep sending me these autobiographical novels to review! And it’s not correct—I was never interested in this as a genre or thinking about this genre…It doesn’t have to be “autobiographical” to talk about life. All novels are basically saying, ‘This experience is also human,’ or ‘This life is no less of a life.’
This is the point of marketing—to find new terms for old and familiar mysteries, terms that disguise those mysteries so we mistake them for something novel. Autofiction is, after all, a term that originated in the blurb on the back of a 1970s French novel. As Christian Lorentzen notes, it “came to us as part of the language of commercial promotion.”
We must admit that we were primed to believe in what we were told made autofiction unique. The books came to us with set-ups we recognized from our lives on the Internet but had yet to find in novels. After all, autofiction’s conceits—its use of real names and real events, keying us into the fact that some of these things actually happened, its willingness to leave narrative behind in favor of opinion or aphorism—are the same conceits we would adopt in order to have successful lives online. We learned to talk about ourselves so we could really talk about the world, or to talk about the world so we could really talk about ourselves. We learned how to be an author and a character simultaneously.
In interviews at the time, Heti would say that the biggest influence in writing How Should A Person Be? was MTV’s show The Hills.“Reality TV is one way of putting it. I haven't been able to explain to anybody what it’s like, because reality TV was just an analogy. But I really did have that question, how should a person be. That was real,” she told The New Inquiry. “And I thought the only way to answer it would be to use life. I wasn’t using life to make a book, I was trying to use life to answer that question.” There is not only the question of what using life for art does to life itself, but also the larger question of why life needs to be used for anything at all. These unanswered questions are what make discussions of autofiction a magnetic topic in the miniature world of literary fiction. After all, as stripping away autofiction’s shiny synthetic prefix reveals, it is also the problem at the heart of all fiction.
These are the questions Sheila Heti sets out to investigate in Alphabetical Diaries, a book that’s been in the works for a very long time. The first excerpts from the project were published in n+1 in 2014. When asked about it then, she described it as a kind of scientific project, bringing an “objective eye to something as not-objective, as personal or as subjective as a diary.” It was then serialized as a New York Times newsletter in 2022, where she wrote that:
With the sentences untethered from narrative, I started to see the self in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. As I returned to the project over the years, it grew into something more novelistic. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences, to introduce some rhythm and beauty.
You find the seeds of Heti’s other books throughout the Diaries in the form of these characteristic preoccupations; even a reader who didn’t know a thing about anything else Heti has written would be able to pick out these thematic concerns. The death of her father in Pure Color: “Dad was perhaps a little manic, the doctors having started him on steroids again. Dad was upset today when the nurse said that what he needed was calories. Dad went home from the hospital today.” Motherhood, as in Motherhood: “I increasingly cannot imagine a life with children.” “I was thinking about having his children, and about writing.” “The idea of raising a child and having a family. The idea of this terrified me profoundly.” “Would having a child prevent all this?”
In this way Alphabetical Diaries is a kind of circumstantial künstlerroman: a novel of artistic maturation. The künstlerroman is another common way of describing autofictional novels, which—as Lorentzen also notes—tend to narrativize their own creation. But where the traditional künstlerroman gets its narrative power from the gradual movement from experience alone to its transformation into art, autofiction is distinct in its apparent denial of transformation. Its writers, depressed by the realization that the life of the writer is a life like any other, are like disillusioned magicians; they let the cards hidden in their sleeves drop to the floor. A gesture that can be read as either narcissistic or humble, to turn to us and say: here is the raw material I have refused to spin into something new.
At the same time, it is always just that: a gesture. Ben Lerner’s wayward fellowship recipients or Rachel Cusk’s novelist alter-ego in Outline may be all banality and insecurity, their own and others, until suddenly they aren’t. Like all fiction, the trick is giving way to the something else that defines imaginative work—surreality, or sublimity, or negative capability if you’re Keatsian, or (my favorite) what poetry critic Allen Grossman referred to as “openness to the uncategorizable present.” Moments where reality, under language’s sway, detaches from the illusion of individual experience and shifts and expands. For Cusk, this is the underlying ethic of her Outline trilogy, where an excess of reality is in fact “a reverse kind of exposition.” By giving us too much, we are able to see where there is not enough—those places where meaning dissolves and shimmers and we find ourselves just “a shape, an outline, with all the detail filled in around it while the shape itself remained blank.”
What Heti lays before us in Alphabetical Diaries is not just the characteristic obsessions that grew into her novels but the same people, mentioned again and again, the same problems—sex, money, failure, love, success—turned over and over in her mind, the same plain and powerful style. Then she takes it one step further. If the plot of the künstlerroman is the process by which life becomes art, Heti dissolves those distinctions entirely in favor of perfect explicitness.
Narrative, the organizing principle we rely on to understand ourselves and the world, is forsaken. (It is also the first thing we go to when we try to understand a novel—that there are so many plot summaries disguised as book reviews should tell us as much.) Instead of the painful contortions of plot, she works under the sign of the first formal principle we learn as children: the alphabet. By taking the unstructured mess of life and putting it into the most obvious structure, Heti transforms her life into a book and her book into an allegory for the process of art itself. The dailinesses of diaries—their documentation of life as a series of discrete units—are reorganized by language at its simplest and become something new.
When asked about the role of her friends in How Should A Person Be?, Heti replied that she “wanted the structure of my novel to be honest about that aspect of how art is made—and how this book in fact was made.” There is a similar impulse here. If the marketing promise of autofiction was that it was somehow more honest and more real than other fiction, Alphabetical Diaries takes that promise as a challenge. Instead of just revealing the details of her life, she reveals to us the process of the book’s own making and shows us exactly how language arranges and deranges life’s material.
This is not to say the book is all revelation, or that it is without insight into Heti’s personal and professional life. Much of the book is completely banal: “She is a bit unfocused. She is an old woman. She is boiling water for coffee. She is cool. She is great-looking.” “Bought a lot of clothes, make-up, spent a lot of money. Bought tea. Bought white shoes.” And there is some excellent gossip to be had in the book, and probably even better blind items hidden behind changed names: “Adam Thirwell and I watched Nymphomaniac two days in a row, and I accidentally ended up sending an email to Lars von Trier from his phone.” “Then seeing Claire on Instagram with Barack Obama, and that she is going to be on SNL, I became so jealous I couldn’t stand it.”
But there is rhythm and beauty too. There are sentences so condensed and crystalline they glint in the light: “I am starting to feel life is not for having experiences, so that therefore one can make deductions about life and one’s personality, and then make up rules for the future by which one can live and therefore attain happiness and perfection.” “I mustn't rush it, but it is, as he said, like a weather pattern coming over the horizon; you can no more stop love than you can stop the weather pattern from moving.” These perfect sentences are always juxtaposed with the banal or the gossipy—for example, the latter quotation is preceded by “I must be ovulating.” and followed by “I need a new bra. I need money.” (As you might expect from the diaries of a writer, money is always a concern here; the former example comes after Heti notes: “I am spending too much money.”)
And of course life is like that: the sublime situated next to everything else. Why else would we be so desperate for narrative? Think of Joan Didion’s most repeated and most misunderstood line: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.” This is not an inspirational line for writers, but an acknowledgment of how much delusion goes into the task of waking up every morning. We have to rearrange our lives—to give a handful of days more weight than entire years, to give a few characters starring roles—so we can feel they are something more than administrative projects marked by disappointment. So we had to invent art, because we had to find a way to turn experience into meaning.
Perhaps this is why from page to page reading Alphabetical Diaries can feel flat, like reading a grocery list or an address book. Subjugated to the law of the letter, everything follows logically; we get A and then B and then C, so on and so on. Language accretes like sediment, building up slowly in pale lines.
For there is only one pleasure that doesn’t fade, and that’s not love—that’s art. For this, I need new clothes. Forced myself to wake up early. Forced myself to write five thousand words today, and saw that, even with the distractions of last night, I could do it, and was glad.
We find the banalities, the beauty, the characters, the characteristics, the details, the gossip, the obsessions, the repetitions.
I love him so! I love him very much. I love him, I do. I love his soft skin, and I want to hold him in my arms, and I love his voice, and how much I want to just crack him open and climb inside him. I love his voice, yelling in the other room.
And we begin to feel a strange sense of movement in us—not the propulsive motion that pushes things forward in a plot, but something more like the turning of a wheel.
Or maybe it was perfect, maybe it was okay. Or maybe it’s a route to some other kind of writing. Or maybe there is so much inner life, it’s unnecessary to get it from the people around you. Or maybe this will finally be the book without characters. Or one could say happiness, joy, liberation, and beauty.
We recognize the slow rotations of an interior life.
That is being alive. That is how I felt when I was younger, anyway. That is how I spent my days. That is life’s activity. That is the only freedom. That is the secret work no one will ever see. That is what Hungarians do, she said. That is what I am here to do.
Weighed down by layers of excess, Heti slips away. A life reveals itself as only momentary impulses or concerns, spreading like ink in water, refusing to cohere but tinting everything.
At the very start of the book, Heti tells us that “a book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding.”
So is a life, we realize.