I was about thirteen when I read my little sister’s diary. I barely had to flip two pages to see: “Ariella is a bitch!! I hope I never hit puberty.” I confronted her and was swiftly, justly punished for invading my sister’s privacy. It’s a story I’ve recounted dozens of times, always to poor reception; I’m not quite sure why I’ve chosen to commit it to writing. How can I justify reading another person’s private thoughts except to say that I’ve only ever kept a journal for it to be read. The “Reader beware!!” warning on the inside cover is just a performance, there to tempt the voyeur more than anything else. I asked my boyfriend if he ever feels a compulsion to flip through my diary. “Why would I?” he said. “You’ve already read to me everything in there.”
For Sheila Heti, too, the diary is a performance, one she’s serialized as “A Diary in Alphabetical Order” for the New York Times since January 2022 and that she has now anthologized as a novel, quite roughly speaking, entitled Alphabetical Diaries. A diary is an interesting project for Heti, who has already recounted the disintegration of her marriage in her breakout novel How Should a Person Be?, wrestled with whether to have a child in Motherhood, and grieved her father’s death in the Governor General’s Award–winning Pure Colour. What else could she possibly be keeping from us? As a prolific diarist, Heti joins the ranks of the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, and Susan Sontag, whose journals are extensions of their prolific literary outputs and have been studied to delineate between the performance of private and public lives—“The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction,” Heti said in the New York Times.
