Sheila Heti on Alphabetical Diaries
Last week we were joined by the wonderful Sheila Heti to celebrate the launch of her Alphabetical Diaries. In taking a decade of her journals, sorting the sentences alphabetically, then paring them down to about a tenth of their original length, Sheila Heti has freed a slice of her life from the shackles of time and in doing so has extracted some other, deeper kind of meaning from it. Alphabetical Diaries is a work that provokes vertiginous reflections on the construction of the self; that reveals how our psychological ticks and day-to-day fixations weigh heavily on our lives; that leads us to reconsider how we see, treat, judge and misjudge our friends and lovers; and that even makes us question how the book as an object works. In conversation with Adam Biles.