N Is for No

In October 2020, the novelist Thea Lim organized the Book Auction to Support Prisoners, a stand-alone fundraising event to benefit a COVID‑19 relief fund for incarcerated Canadians. Sheila Heti donated a signed first edition of her 2010 book, How Should a Person Be? My bid won, and she sent me the novel together with a signed copy of her 2001 debut story collection, The Middle Stories. Her inscription was pithy and meaningful: “Thank you for helping the prisoners! I hope you are not one, in any way.” It saddens me to share that, as revealed by her Alphabetical Diaries, Heti herself has become a prisoner — not of any particular person or ideology but of her own pursuit of pleasure.

The basic premise of Alphabetical Diaries is enticing and formally inventive. Heti copied 500,000 words from a decade of her journals into a spreadsheet. Then she arranged the sentences alphabetically before cutting nearly 90 percent of the original...