David Remnick: Sheila Heti is the kind of novelist that people talk about and have really strong opinions about, too. She's been very influential in the literary world and well beyond. Her book, How Should a Person Be? from 2010 helped launch the trend that's called autofiction, books that twist and blur the boundaries between the novel and the memoir. Writing about Heti's last book, the New Yorkers critic, Parul Sehgal, called out her work's whimsical self-consciousness, and its preoccupation with mysticism, questions of faith and ethics.

Parul Sehgal: To me, Sheila Heti is one of the most interesting novelists working today. She is ruthlessly contemporary, by which I mean she's not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise. She's constantly trying to figure out new places fiction can go, new ways that we're using language, new ways that our minds are evolving.

David Remnick: Here's Paul Segel.

Parul Sehgal: Her newest book is titled Alphabetical Diaries. She draws from 10 years of her diaries that she kept, and she took sentences, questions, little moments from her diaries, and has woven them into a new text that has all the best characteristics of a diary. It feels very intimate, it feels private, it feels charged with all the kinds of questions you can only bring to your diary. She makes of it a separate kind of novel populated with characters that emerged from her own life. I think even in Heti's career, which has been marked by so many kinds of formal innovation. It has a freshness and surprise all its own. I think this is your 11th book?

Sheila Heti: Yes.

Parul Sehgal: Alphabetical Diaries is your 11th book. Even by your standards, this one, to me, felt fresh, daring, risky. Can you tell us what you've done?

Sheila Heti: It's basically, I took 10 years of my diaries, which I wrote on my computer and put it all into an Excel spreadsheet and then alphabetized the sentences by the first letter of the sentence and so on. I think the last 10 years were just trying to figure out how should this be read? Should it be unbearable? Or should it be welcoming? How much of it is this sort of scientific experiment of what happens, and how much of it should it be a novel and pleasurable to read and feel narrative despite the lack of chronology?

Parul Sehgal: I was wondering if we could have you read from it for a little bit, just to give a sense of, as you say, these entries were often in the purpose of figuring something out. There are these prickly questions that come lapping at us that you have arranged. I have something from the T chapter, but we can read anything that you--

Sheila Heti: T chapter is fine. This is how the T chapter begins. "Terrible day. Texting me pictures and apology. Thank God my youth is ending. That Edie Sedgwick should commit suicide. That face, that feeling I had, that pit of fear that he could not love me is not a reason to not be with him, but a reason to be with him. That feels right to me, and that's the way I want to be in the world.

That gives me hope for things, for everything turning out okay. That hot summer with squares of light coming through the leaves and sparkling on the ground, that is because I got up at six this morning. 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'm here to do. That is what the culture demands of female writers, to be as low as possible. That is what you can learn from writing this book."

Parul Sehgal: I have to keep myself from laughing. That last line, can I ask you what you learned from writing this book? One of the things? Some of the things you learned?

Sheila Heti: It's funny. I wasn't sure that I had learned anything. Then a couple months ago I was writing something and I started to feel really depressed. I thought, "You haven't learned anything from editing this book for 15 years.?" Then I realized I could let myself write without paying so much attention to chronology and just let my mind skip through time much more nimbly, I guess. I think that's what I learned. Chronology is not the only thing that keeps a person going from beginning to end. I think I'd known that before, but I hadn't known it quite this much. The way that the mind understands time is not chronological.

Parul Sehgal: Without chronology, what are some of the ways that you found yourself thinking about how to get the reader going from beginning to end? What becomes the engine, the sort of momentum in this book?

Sheila Heti: I think it's more like music. It's more like a rhythm. I think it's juxtaposition. I was really like, "Oh, if you cut those six sentences and then sentence number one and sentence number seven are beside each other, that creates a really interesting friction." I think looking forward to the surprise of those juxtapositions, maybe. I don't know. I think by the end of all my editing, it had become a world, and so you're in that world and there's a texture and there's a color to it and there's a character. All the things that I guess are in a normal novel, but I didn't know.

Sometimes I tried different things. Sometimes I put all the years into one document and other times I tried, "Okay, maybe you do 2005 as one chapter all in alphabetical order, 2006 as one chapter all in alphabetical order, 2007. There were so many different attempts and-- I don't know. What am I trying to even do? There's this way that I was trying to figure out what is even the interesting in this.

Parul Sehgal: I want to understand a little bit more about what it felt like to be moving these things around. You described it as musical and you described it as the rhythm, but it's a book that reads very well and it has a narrative starts to coalesce. Tell us a little bit more about how it started to come together and started to move for you.

Sheila Heti: I wanted it to, so-

Parul Sehgal: I made it.

[laughter]

Parul Sehgal: I made it move.

Sheila Heti: I tried to narrow the number of characters so that you would get familiar with people. There were certain locations that I left out, so that you would feel like the world was circumscribed enough. References to things that only come up once I was less likely to keep in than references to things that come up six or seven times. Then there were certain times in the diary where there would be some scene described at length. I would opt to have that in the book because you remember as you go through the chapters, "Oh right, you're in this place, you're in this place." Because 10 years is a long time, I wanted it to feel like a smaller world than what 10 years actually spans in some way.

Parul Sehgal: I know we're speaking about this novel as a novel, which we should, but I'm feeling nosy a little bit. I'm wondering if going back and spending that much time in your diaries showed you something that you didn't understand or you understand better about some of the events that you were writing about or thinking about?

Sheila Heti: I don't know. You think every guy that you're with is so different from every other one and when you see it all taken apart like this, you're just like, "Oh, I'm just going through the same thing over and over." It's like this category of thinking that actually can very easily be replaced.

Parul Sehgal: It's humbling, isn't it?

[laughter]

Sheila Heti: Yes. It's sort of depressing. I guess the other thing that was weird is just like, yes, there's archetypal people in your life. It was very easy to make composite characters because there are certain people you're drawn to and if that person falls out of your life, here comes another person that you draw into your life that has the same traits. That was interesting to see, which makes the people in your life feel like at once more essential, like you need this bossy, whatever, female friend or whatever it is. I don't know. More like people playing like actors in a role or you cast them in a role, maybe they're not actually bossy. You just make them bossy or feel that they're bossing you. I don't know. It's strange.

Parul Sehgal: Lately, when I've been talking to writers of all kinds, I've just been asking them the same question. I'm wondering how you're thinking about the novel now. Having done this experiment, are there other possibilities of the novel that it's opened up for you? You mentioned chronology, but I'm curious about how it has you thinking about the form?

Sheila Heti: I don't know. I've been working on this new book for the last two or three years that involves these conversations that I've had with this chatbot. I think working with the diaries, what was nice about it all this time was that it didn't really feel like my voice, because when you're writing for a diary, you're not writing-- It's not like a literary voice, and so you're working with something that's not intended for a book. There's something fun and refreshing about that. I think it's fun to find writing that shouldn't be in a novel and to figure out, can it do the same things that we want writing in novels to do, which is move us and tell us something new about the world and about ourselves. I'm just really tired of my own voice right now.

[laughter]

Parul Sehgal: Very frequently, your novels are described as formally experimental and daring and avant-garde. I'm curious, if this is a conscious strategy, if this is something that you are drawn to when you're putting together a book, or if it's something, these sort of technical risks and formal challenges you set yourself, if it's something that emerges from the story as you begin telling it?

Sheila Heti: Yes, it emerges. I think that's right. Except for this Alphabetical Diaries book, which just did start off with a formal idea, this very strict formal idea that I was trying to follow, but with all the other books, no, honestly, I always want to write a straight realist novel. I'm always trying to make something proper, like the books that I love most, like Crime and Punishment or whatever, and a kind of-- but it doesn't happen [chuckles] because I think I don't notice the same things that those writers that I love notice. I'm impatient with certain things that they were patient with.

The books morph according to all these characteristics of, what are you impatient with? What are you actually curious about? What actually looks beautiful to you on the page? What sounds good to your ear? All that changes what the book becomes. I think in my head when I'm starting a new one, I always think this is going to be something that I've read and loved and I just want to make something like that.

Parul Sehgal: You once said, and I think this was around the time How Should A Person Be came out, that you were interested in experimenting with the contemporary. When I think of your work, and I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier, about your novels never feeling nostalgic, it never really feels like you're trying to do Middlemarch again. You're always trying to say, "What else can I do with character, and scene, and dialogue, and this portable form, and just being in somebody's hands for a while."

Sheila Heti: Yes. I mean, I'd love to [laughs] write Middlemarch-

Parul Sehgal: Listen.

Sheila Heti: -again.

[laughter]

Sheila Heti: Don't get me wrong.

Parul Sehgal: This might be a dare. [laughter] I'm wondering if the contemporary in that particular way is still alluring to you, is something that still feels like something you are interested in meeting?

Sheila Heti: Yes. You're right here and that's really rare. This moment is gone now. What is this moment? I think that that's, it's kind of scary and exciting to be right here. I guess that's why you're here right now, to document right now or to look around right now. It's as interesting as any other time. I just feel like this kinship with [chuckles], this feeling like everyone who's alive today, we're all here in this moment together. In a hundred years, no one will know what we all know, you know? I kind of, yes, you want to be present for it. It seems special to be alive in a time with other people.

[music]

Parul Sehgal: That was an amazing answer. Thank you.

Sheila Heti: Oh, thanks for having me. That was so fun.

David Remnick: Sheila Heti's new book is called Alphabetical Diaries, and she spoke to staff writer Parul Sehgal.

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