A habitual diarist radically compresses and reorders ten years of life, asking not how a person should be, but how a person is.
THE ALPHABETICAL DIARIES
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Spring 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)
“A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically. Perhaps this would help me identify patterns and repetitions. How many times had I written, I hate him, for example? 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. When I was asked about a work of fiction that could be serialized, I thought of these diaries: The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction, and what is a more fundamental mode of serialization than the alphabet? After some editing, here is the result.” —Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century.” She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.
Mistake number one: Fun-loving Jake tells his girlfriend Jessica that they have to go to Tegan’s end of summer party in their tiny California beach town. Jessica doesn’t like parties and she doesn’t like Tegan, who has an obvious, obsessive crush on Jake. But Jessica agrees to go, to make Jake happy. 
Twelve years after the events of House of Salt and Sorrows, the Thaumas sisters are scattered across Arcannia. Camille rules over Highmoor as an efficient duchess. Annaleigh, Keeper of the Light, runs Old Maude with husband Cassius. Lenore is long gone, wandering throughout Arcannia. Honor is a governess in Foresia and Mercy lives at court, a companion to the two princesses. Despite dreams of adventures, almost-eighteen year old Verity has remained at Highmoor. She has no memory of the tragic events or her part within them. She spends her days filling hundreds of sketchbooks and canvases with portraits and paintings. Unfortunately, not all her subjects are alive. Verity is still seeing ghosts, she just doesn’t know it. When Mercy sends word that the Duchess of Bloem is interested in having Verity paint a portrait of her son, Alexander, Verity jumps at the chance. Verity is also quickly drawn to Alexander Laurent. Though a childhood accident left him without the use of his legs, Alexander roams the estate in a wicker wheelchair, taking Verity on adventurous and romantic outings as they grow closer. When he proposes she joyfully accepts. Even the constant revelry can’t hold back a new series of nightmares from plaguing Verity. She longs to confide in Alex but finds him much changed since the engagement. When she spots him walking through the halls of Chauntilalie one night, she fears that nothing is as it seems.
It’s summertime in New York City and Magnolia Wu is stuck helping her parents at the family-owned Bing Qi Ling Bubbles Laundromat. While her classmates are off at summer camps and on vacation, Magnolia longs to escape the daily monotony of laundromat life. Luckily the Wu family keeps a sock board where all the lost socks get pinned. With her dog, Mister Pants, as her sidekick, Magnolia becomes New York’s leading Sock Detective, venturing into the city’s chaos to return every sock to its rightful owner.