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  • Alphabetical Diaries

  • By: Sheila Heti
  • Narrated by: Kate Berlant
  • Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
  • 4.1 out of 5 stars (7 ratings)

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Alphabetical Diaries

By: Sheila Heti
Narrated by: Kate Berlant
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Publisher's summary

"Berlant adds that extra pizazz, so you really get a window into the creative mind as it shifts quickly from moments of despair to lightbulbs of insight to incidents of sexual desire to the recollection of totally random literary facts."—Vulture on Alphabetical Diaries

"Heti's candid revelations will stir listeners."—AudioFile on Alphabetical Diaries

This program is read by Emmy-nominated comedian, actress, and writer, Kate Berlant.

A thrilling confessional from the award-winning, beloved author of Pure Colour.

Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts over a ten-year period, then arranged the sentences from A to Z. Passionate and reflective, joyful and despairing, these are her alphabetical diaries.

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

©2024 Sheila Heti (P)2024 Macmillan Audio
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Critic reviews

[An] arresting literary experiment . . . What the book lacks in traditional narrative structure, Heti supplements with evocative snapshots of life, detailing broken love affairs, mediocre meals, and professional triumphs with the controlled chaos of a late-night thought spiral. She juxtaposes the mundane (‘My book will be done this year!’) and the profound (‘I wonder if I wanted to be a writer because nobody ever told me the truth’). The arcs of friendships and romantic relationships are sliced up and remixed, raising subtextual questions about the linearity of time and the nature of change.”Publisher’s Weekly

“While it might be the repetition that immediately catches the eye, it's Heti’s lists’ slight differences that give them resonance: ‘But love can endure. But love is not enough.’ This mutability, likely true of most diaries—and most people's internal lives—is put on display here through the compression of time, which allows almost every sentence to read like a profound truth, only to have the next sentence complicate it. The emotive nature of Heti's precise language takes center stage . . . A thought-provoking experiment in self-reflection and prose, Alphabetical Diaries is perhaps Sheila Heti's most intimate and most universal book yet.—Alice Martin, Shelf Awareness

"Readers will become familiar with a set of thematic preoccupations: anxieties about professional success, churning erotic aspirations and frustrations, self-deprecating confessions masking self-regard. Heti provides some genuine fun in her invitation to discover more conventional coherence by reconstructing a chronological version of events . . . An original form of self-exposure emerges as we see some of the author’s verbal habits laid bare."—Kirkus Reviews

Dear Listener,

What inspired me to arrange my journal entries in alphabetical order?
"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; it became about time, and other preoccupations. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences to introduce some rhythm and beauty and narrative." – Sheila Heti, writer of Alphabetical Diaries

What listeners say about Alphabetical Diaries

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I love this book and the narration.

Sheila Heti is genius to have arranged her thoughts in this way. Once you get used to the rhythm and patterns, it becomes more organic and compelling than chronological could ever be. It feels so honest and vulnerable to organize your thoughts like this. Kate Berlant is truly the best possible person to narrate this book. She adds the perfect amount of emotion and clarity to each sentence. I am so grateful to Heti and Berlant for this audiobook.

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