Product Description
Sheila Heti collected hald a millions words from a decade's worth of journals, put them in a spreadsheet, and sorted them alphabetically. She spent the next ten years cutting and refining, and was left with 60,000 words of brilliance and mayhem, joy and sorrow. These are her alphabetical diaries.
A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding. A book like a shopping mart, all the selections. A book that does only one thing, one thing at a time. A book that even the hardest of men would read. A book that is a game. A budget will help you know where to go. A bunch of us met to have dinner that night, but I left and walked off by myself, bought the silver ring, a bag of chips, then sat in the main square and bummed a cigarette off an old French man, then continued to sit there for many hours until the man with the bulgy eyes came to sit next to me and flirt. A bus came that was going to the ferry, but because I hesitated before getting on, he drove angrily away. A certain kind of bore who has said all he is saying, said it all before, and expects to hear nothing new from you on the subject. A certain lack of self-centred- ness, belief in one’s own innate genius, and faith in hard work, long hours. A child to love in that way, a man to want in that way, and all the collaborators; people with whom I can write the most heartbreaking books, and the books I write alone. A child until he is seven. A city in which people speak another language is good, because their conversations are not so distracting or irritating. A commitment to the relationship with the full understanding that the relationship will evolve and change as you two evolve and change. A curiosity about self-help. A desire to do acting. A desire to help people. A desire to uplift humanity. A different way of living now, according to my feelings and values, rather than according to stories and symbols. A drive to town for booze with Tom to get vodka for watching the movie. A fashion designer in the New York Times Magazine yesterday said, I decided to be my homosexual self. A feeling that he will completely reject me, that I don’t know what’s going on, or that he’s mad. A feeling that I could occupy myself with this feeling forever. A feminist feeling. A few minutes later he returned and untied me. A few weeks ago there was a tick in my head, a kind of check mark— it happened in a dream and upon waking—about where I am in life; I had reached adulthood and the task would be different now. A few weeks ago, sleeping with him, I realized for the first time what it meant to have sex with somebody. A flush went up high in my cheeks. A funny thing happens with regard to men when one suddenly comes into a bit of money. A glamorous life I could be leading in New York, full of parties and glamorous people, never feeling sad, alone, left out, apart. A hot man who loves me. A human knows too little to answer such questions. A human must be responded to by a human. A husband is good insurance against the crazy, against the many things of the world. A Jane Austen novel, of course, or inspired by that. A kind of tyranny to think about beauty and love all the time, when there is really nothing to think about. A lack of values, a lack of privacy, and a lack of modesty, which is making me feel kind of sick. A life in a new place for a while. A life which is beside the main current of life. A little correspondence with Lemons. A little distance between this energy and myself. A little nervous. A little too long, and it’s boring now. A look of concern, like my mother’s look of concern, is settling over my face. A loss and an unhappiness. A lot of changes are happening. A lot of fear, but of what? A lot of people in their twenties get an addiction. A lot of talk about couples and dating, but the more I think about it, the more I think I’ve been in a pretty sweet situation this past month, not dating. A man must part company with the inferior and the superficial. A man of discretion. A man to love. A man who could physically kill me in under a minute is a man who is easy to sleep beside. A man who goes out in the world and gets what he wants for himself. A man who I could have in the centre of my life, even a child, and my family could fit themselves into the healthiness and happiness of that. A man who would be mine. A manic feeling yesterday made me almost rent out that apartment in New York, but I won’t—it’s not yet time for that. A mild form of hysteria, always. A moment after seeing him, a big lurch went through my stomach, and I tried not to look at him as we talked. A new relation to life. A new relationship, born from the ashes of the old and dead one. A new tone, a new ring tone. A nice kind of animal impulse to want to sit near a tree, just because it’s a tree, and we continued to drink, from the blue goblet, the vodka and orange juice that Tom had squeezed with his bare hands. A person’s life should not be so filled up that a surprise friend can’t come in, but that doesn’t mean they have to become your new best friend. A person’s loyalty should always be to their partner, but I talked more than I wanted to or intended to about Pavel. A phone call from him yesterday—a surprise. A place I partly crave to settle into, but don’t. A playfulness, a sense of life being without consequence, that voracious sexuality that wants to eat things up, that selfishness, that kind of confidence and cockiness and ease, being on top of things, being in New York. A quiche and then an apple pie for dessert? A radical sympathy with all people based on their integrity as becomings, not beings; as people who experience the potential freedom of their own souls, so to radically know that people experience themselves from the inside, and not one person alive has ever experienced themselves from the outside. A return to writing.
