“It is the Despair of One’s Life, Being One’s Character”

Mahrukh Aamir on Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries

Post-college, which means post-living together, I experience my friends mostly through conversation. Sometimes the conversation is face-to-face if my friend is my coffee date. Other times the conversation happens by way of scheduled phone call. My friend, who’s wont to dress a certain way and talk a certain way, is made entirely of repetitions. Sheila Heti’s narrator in Alphabetical Diaries has her words and manner of dress, too; remaining largely unchanged throughout the book. There’s an affinity for green skirts, for example; there’s lipstick, a red YSL one; the Heti-narrator thinks about hair, whether to grow out her bangs, pin them back, et cetera. She talks about soul a lot, and one’s values. Glamour is also a word she uses often, or often enough to stick. Glamorous parties, glamorous life, glamour in books—and all I, the reader of Heti’s new book, can think is: there exist people in this world who don’t think about glamour at all.   

Then there are things the Heti-narrator thinks about that she would rather not think about, but thinks about all the same. Men are such a waste of brain-space, she says in this book. She says it over and over again. You know you look to men to distract you from your work. And: You are wasting your life, always ruminating on men. And: My main wish for life right now is not to think about men all the time, but to ever more think about men less and less, and to look around at the world, and at my books, and at the books I want to write and the work I want to do, and get over my neuroses about everything, and stop smoking and feel my own will, which is my soul, and to have some control over how I react, and to be in the world in a more thoughtful way, and to come out of childhood and be a woman at last. More, this time desperately: I can starve or asphyxiate the part of my brain that thinks about men. It’s an uncool admission, entirely pathetic, but pathetic in the way Eileen Myles would call pathetic, which is to say honest and worthy of being in a book.

When I sit across from my friend, we don’t talk about men. But, readying myself for conversation, Saturday morning, hair still damp from my shower, taking a mental note not to do that again even though I’ll do that again, I know what to expect. And yet—if my friend is good-friend enough—I delight in this conversation anyway. It’s a conversation that by now is only a version of a conversation we’ve had many times over, probably made in the image of some original conversation when we first started to get to know each other. My repetitions are entirely compatible with my friend’s, each repeat conversation also yielding something new, although without that pressure. Gossip, superficiality, vanity—we’re prone to all of that, too. 

To think about this consciously is to think about this a little embarrassingly, if not outright horrifyingly: repetitions are uninteresting. Aren’t repetitions uninteresting? Drunk people, for example, are repetitious. There is something pathological about it, especially if one talks only about the matter at hand, and doesn’t link it to something more universal. What I mean to say is: picture someone neurotic, but not endearingly so. Their neuroses allow no breathing space, no chance at rumination of a more general kind.

Perhaps I don’t mean to say “pathological.” Perhaps I mean to say “boring.” My students, too, when they want to say they don’t like a text, and especially when I suspect they’ve only skim-read the text, say, mock annoyance on their faces, that “the excerpt was too repetitive.” It’s the easiest dismissal. People must be interesting. People in books, especially, are obligated to be interesting. How does a character justify their existence otherwise? 

The more formulaic or traditional way to write an interesting character—or a character—is to have them change by the end of the story. Real people are subject to constant change, too. Change means one has something—a thing!—to say on the phone like: I am pregnant, or I am engaged—some narrative push to one’s life. Heti’s protagonist in Ticknor, her first novel, is also one of her more repetitious characters; so much so that he, George Ticknor, often takes the space of several sentences to say one. The novel begins: There were no books when I was a boy. Books were hardly accessible, yet there were some books. That is why I did not develop literary taste. I read what I found and it was for fun. You read mostly for idle pleasure. I did not read for fun, nor was I cultivating my mind. I cannot imagine cultivating anything as a young boy. 

To have a character in a story remain unchanged, then, is either failure or firm, authorial decision. Heti’s Ticknor doesn’t experience revelation the way most protagonists in most other novels experience this almost-guaranteed deliverance, this grace. Rachel Cusk does this too; leaves Faye, her protagonist in the Outline trilogy (2014, 2016, 2018), unchanged by epiphany or event, thus bringing to attention a new kind of novel, or simply snuffing out the old one which doesn’t accommodate a stubbornly unchanging character. In Cusk’s trilogy, in fact, there’s no traditional character in that Faye is hollow, vessel-like; perceptive to the point of privileging other characters’ stories—the events of their lives—more memorably than her own. More clearly the books’ form: monologue after monologue, disguised as conversation. I say “disguised” because Faye is still very much a participant in these conversations even as she remains unnaturally—artificially—a very good listener. I’m not interested in character, Cusk says in a New Yorker interview, because I don’t think character exists anymore. She also goes on to say, I don’t believe in suspense.

What, then, of boredom? This writerly anxiety that follows me, also, outside my writing hours? I talk of repetition, but the tendency for monologue is also an embarrassing trait. Except—what of the chance to think out loud, and to find someone generous enough to let you think out loud, except that it doesn’t feel like a generous act because they—friend or friend-of-your-mind—are so interested in what you have to say that they interrupt your monologue with a monologue of their own, so that it doesn’t feel like an interruption because you both, both of you, are also building onto the same thought, so that it’s more of an instance of thinking together but thinking together loudly, without shame or fear-of-judgment as constraint—“Interrupt me,” I say to my friend, who is haloed in clean February light, when I don’t know how to end an unraveling sentence.

*

If change feels like such an imposition: doesn’t a life of stasis, even if outside the novel, still have its plot points? There’s college and marriage, children and old age. Death would be the final plot point, the final change. But in my twenty-ninth year, soon to be thirty, I’m writing in Lahore. Nothing is happening even as I’m grateful for big windows, natural light, birds. This looks like a painting, and I’m thinking: perhaps these works are interested in a different iteration of truth. Perhaps these works stick more resolutely to the truth of our time, which is to say that little happens; or entirely too much happens. 

Reading and rereading Alphabetical Diaries, I think of Édouard Levé’s autobiographical Autoportrait (2005).  I think of the string of sentences, one after another, completely unparagraphed and completely untethered from plot: page after page after page. And yet Levé’s is a book full of disparate events, even if no one event—I have attempted suicide once, I’ve been tempted four times to attempt it—is privileged over another.  The distant sound of a lawn mower in summer brings back happy childhood memories. Both sentences are written in exact sequence; all events, thoughts, opinions, facts exist in Levé’s work within the constraint of a single sentence each. Only occasionally is more space granted, at most a few more sentences. An Anglo-Indian accent inspires immediate sympathy in me. My mother stopped making family photo albums when I became an adolescent. I don’t make photo albums. 

Heti deals more sensuously with time. Where Levé’s work feels like a burst—or short bursts—Heti’s contains time that is felt as more protracted. Alphabetical Diaries is culled from 500,000 words worth of journals kept for more than a decade. Levé’s work is more ejaculatory in that it is future-facing, less interested in obvious retrospection. When I hungered for this mood again, I went on to read Jesse Ball’s very own autoportrait attempt, also titled Autoportrait (2022). Ball adopts Levé’s form completely; finishing his version, also at 30, 000 words, within the span of a single day. The last two sentences of Ball’s epigraph read: He [Levé] wrote it in his thirty-ninth year. In my thirty-ninth year, this book follows his. 

Levé’s form then went on to prove sturdy in real-time when I assigned my students the same exercise, an in-class autoportrait attempt, one November afternoon. It was the most enjoyable work I’d received all semester; addictive, a bit like scrolling. I read Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait today, and got very excited as I read the word ‘ketamine.’/ I love the flavor of artificial cheese, especially in Maggie Noodles./ My worst fear is being pregnant and giving birth./ I feel naked without my backpack./ I used to think God looked like Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan when I was five./ There aren’t many South Indians in Pakistan, and I like the attention that comes from being different. 

This form is decidedly monologue: most if not all sentences begin with, or contain, an I. There exist no characters besides this I-narrator. This I-I-I, then, is felt as a complete shedding. Levé himself lived a short life, dying by suicide at age 42. In contrast, the Heti-narrator thinks not just once, but several times, that life is much too long. The T-section: Though lying in bed with him last night, I had a sense of how long life is, and how young I am relative to how much there is to go. The L-section: Life is long so growth can happen slowly, but I always want it to happen all at once. The I-section: I always forget how long life is. 

Heti, by way of editing, only gives one section, the I-section, a place for her I-sentences. Her’s is not a shedding, but a folding in on itself, more patterned, more accordioned. Alphabetical Diaries is a book—Heti likes the word “book” over novel—that contains a host of characters, made up of amalgams of people she knew during the period of her writing the journals. In place of event or plot, archetypes abound. These people do a lot of things, some of them hurtful as in the case of a love interest called Lars: Lars replied to my text without any real love, and twice he got off the phone quickly. Lars said he didn’t like it because it made him feel like a sex toy, to come into bed and have me pull of his clothes and want to fuck. Lars said that he wants to be single again and that he wants to be with lots of girls, girls in Mexico. 

Or they say a lot of things, as in the example of friends, Claire and Hanif: Hanif talked about the unconscious; how even if it doesn’t exist, now it in fact does. Hanif thinks that craft is what writers concern themselves with when they have no subject or passion by birthright. Claire said that it’s good for an artist to be in a relationship with someone who gets them out of their head. Claire said that love has never been a problem for her.

Coffee again. And sitting across from my friend, I know that language is the closest I can get to her experience of living. That, if I’m to only have conversations, I rely entirely on language, and the way her language works in tandem with mine. What this friend chooses to reveal, what she chooses to conceal; the part of her personality she decides to play up, so that this in-between thing—language—acts not just as buffer but also as lone bridge. The characters who people Heti’s book, also, are existential reminders of how one exists within—is constrained by—the contours of one’s body, hopelessly circumscribed by one’s experience, which is just a singular experience among many in this world.  If part of what it means to be a human is not to have many experiences, but to have one perpetual experience of the self which never ceases, then it’s best to stop performing to know who you truly are and look yourself flush in the face. From the same section: It is the despair of one’s life, being one’s character, having one’s characteristic pain, knowing who you are and seeing yourself for who you are, your limitations and whatever is tragic within you, which reveals itself despite your best intentions. 

*

This exercise of looking, or more precisely looking back, reminds me of Lisa Robertson’s own sequential projects titled, Rousseau’s Boat (2004), R’s Boat (2010), and more recently, just Boat (2022). Where Heti culls from journals of a more confessional nature—diaries, basically—Robertson uses notebooks kept for teaching, researching, scrawling. It’s more accurately what Foucault refers to as “hupomnemata” in an essay titled “Self Writing.” These hupomnemata, he says, should not be thought of simply as a memory support, which might be consulted from time to time, as occasion arose; they are not meant to be substituted for a recollection that may fail. They constitute, rather, a material and a framework for exercises to be carried out frequently: reading, rereading, meditating, conversing with oneself and others. The idea is that this store, visited and revisited, becomes inseparable from the practitioner themselves, deeply lodged in the soul. In a sentence from Boat, Robertson says: all my work exists/ and I simply borrow from it.  

Where Robertson’s constraints feel lax or intuitive—an indexical reading of her notebooks based on theme—Heti’s are powered by Excel, more strictly oulipian. Robertson has composed poems; Heti’s sentences have their characteristic bare, almost-colloquial quality. It’s a recognizable sentence, one that populates earlier works such as How Should a Person Be? (2010) But in both writers’ works, especially Robertson’s, there’s a practice, not unlike that of the Greco-Roman hupomnemata, to concretize through this assimilative writing—as Foucault calls it—some iteration of truth, which is an acquired truth.  And as a refusal of a mental attitude turned towards the future, it provides a pinning at a point in time which eschews the traditional—taken-for-granted, taken-as-truth—plot points of a life. What, after all, is worthy of being recorded? Of being made into a book? 

In Robertson’s poems we see pinned the type of notebooks she uses, sometimes olive-green; the color of ink, sometimes violet; a folder 10, a track 20. So there’s engagement not just with the content or story of a life, but with what produces that story-content itself. Of sentences, so thing-like—thing-ly— in Robertson’s imagination, she writes: In 2007/ I am walking down the street getting sunburnt/ I think of a sentence and it disappears into the landscape/ this movement is a pleasure. Elsewhere: Ricoeur, citing Benveniste: ‘The sentence pours language/ back into the universe.’/ I think this is so/ and if the sentence pours/ it pours in a direction. / Who pours the sentence?/ The friend pours it./ There’s a pouring sense/ the sentence as this cup or vessel/ or mouth, the mouthfeel of the sentence as it pours. After a night of reading Robertson’s work, to which I have been so recently and luckily introduced, I dreamt I was walking on pages. 

Heti’s form is more uneasy. It reminds me of methods of divination than just whimsy, bringing to mind the I-Ching from her novel, Motherhood (2018). Underneath all this playfulness, some question needs answering. But I’m affected by the all-at-onceness of this book, its beating heart, much in the same way I experience a friend sitting across from me. When I think of my friend—my friend an amalgam in this essay, of the conversation partners I hold dear—I don’t think of a person made up of events, even if events have happened to her, or she has happened onto events. What I’m more interested in, and so more tapped into, is a certain rhythm noticeable only through familiarity. Perhaps when I think of celebrities, say, Miley Cyrus, I think more naturally of event, but only because I’m not familiar with the grammar of their thought. 

To be attuned to the music of someone’s thought, all at once so obviously without music, so obviously a cacophony, is to be granted a special and privileged access into their world—with the risk that nothing glitters, nothing is of note, maybe nothing even happens. But that’s not the point. I find my friend interesting even as she has nothing new to say. We enjoy thinking together for the pleasure of it. This is unlike gossip, or a conversation which is strictly gossip, because gossip is all event and minimal interiority. So Alphabetical Diaries works for this reason most of all: it concretizes pure thought, otherwise so ineffable—my friend walking back to her orange truck after coffee; lone cirrus cloud in the sky, Boise in 2022, everything now lost—and shows its reader how rhythmic it can be.

Eventually—and this is one of the strange delights of the book—the Heti-narrator’s consciousness takes over my own, so that her disembodied voice becomes mine. It’s hard not to say, to mentally shout, by the time I reach the W-section: Well, that’s very convenient! What a boring life, to always be rehashing the same old things. What a charlatan, who skims the surface of everything—no direction, no will, a faker, a flake, a no-nothing. What a hot sun! What a load of rubbish all this writing is. What a stupid thing to do. What a terrible week it’s been. What am I going to do? What beauty could be made from this randomness. Breathless, the Heti-narrator and I continue: What bullshit this is. What can a person accomplish in fiction without a memory? What can you learn from other arts that you cannot learn from this one? What century am I living in that I have to pay my debts to modernism? What did Beckett know? What do actors know? What do I have to be so afraid of? Reading hundreds of pages in one sitting, I experience effects without knowing their cause.

And I feel the truth of these effects less skeptically because a sentence, so small a unit of thought, cannot be leveled with the charge—that of containing untruth—the same way a paragraph or narrative logic of story can.  It either happened or didn’t happen, but there’s no embellishment; no filling up of gaps so that a paragraph has enough structure to stand on its own. Simply: a sentence is not a means to an end, not a way to get to the bottom of the page so that one can begin reading at the top of the next. And in this way, the gradations of sentences in Alphabetical Diaries stand out as sharp, granular, leafy. 

I’ve been invoking my friend throughout this essay. At its close, maybe she says we’ll talk again next Saturday; again a two-hour slot, to set this concretely down on this page. She says: you get Miley Cyrus’s arms most easily not by pilates but by lifting. This could have been a Wednesday, and this could have happened on the phone. She points out that I’ve been using the word “texture” a lot. The texture of a thought, changed so easily by physical exercise; by waking up early; by sleeping on time; by not having coffee. I can’t help but think about this amalgam-friend even as Alphabetical Diaries, like all good books, is not a representation. Like all good books, it is the thing itself. In its reading, I feel closer to the truth—of what, I’m not sure, but it’s not the same truth revealed at the end of a story. It’s more like painting-truth, the way you feel a painting in your chest when especially porous.