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Alphabetical Diaries
- Narrated by: Kate Berlant
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
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Alphabetical Diaries
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Publisher's Summary
Sheila Heti collected 500,000 words from a decade's worth of journals, put the sentences in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She cut and cut and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.
What the critics say
“Powerful and intimate. . . . [Alphabetical Diaries] is made up of Heti’s frank, funny, filthy, and casually philosophical diaries, ten years of them. . . . Heti has written a small classic; she has shot a lasting arrow into the hide of the memoir form. . . . A profound experience.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times
“[Alphabetical Diaries] burrows so deeply into a single psyche that it transcends the personal, as if emerging from one collective, neurotic consciousness. . . . The [result] is exhilarating: both intimate and withholding, repetitive and generative. . . . A monologue that is meditative, propulsive and yet yearning, like a chant, a mantra or a prayer.’” —The New Statesman
“Alphabetical Diaries feels like the apotheosis of [Heti’s] writing style: a book that uses a rigid structural discipline to intimately lay bare the inherently chaotic, even arbitrary nature of consciousness. . . . Heti . . . has turned the pitfalls of the diary form—the relentless self-absorption, the combination of trivia and pathos—into a dazzling aesthetic virtue. Like a hologram, this book refracts an endlessly shifting light. . . . The results are strangely moving.” —The Telegraph