Sheila Heti: "Getting divorced at just 28 years old was devastating and inspiring."

BarcelonaThe intimate life of Sheila Heti (Toronto, 1976) can be read in more than 25 languages. The Canadian author has been experimenting with autobiographical literature for almost two decades thanks to books such as Maternity (2018; in Catalan in Más Libros) and How a person should be (2012; in Spanish in Alpha Decay). In Alphabetical newspapers, published in Catalan by Angle Editorial and translated by Maria Bosom, presents a proposal of remarkable formal singularity: it arranges in alphabetical order and gleans ten years of diaries that end up constructing an ingenious, amusing, and at the same time melancholic text about a decisive period in the writer's life.

The reader who opens this diary in the Catalan translation will find a text arranged in a very different way from the English one.

— Can I ask you how the book begins, in Catalan?

With a phrase that says: "Some people like the richness of life, but to me it's always seemed like a kind of distraction."

— What is the second sentence?

"Other than that, my life is going very well." And the third goes like this: "On the horizon, the pale sky turned mauve."

— That's a good start, then.

It seemed that way to me.

— Thank you!

It's illustrative of what readers will find below. Perhaps it would be helpful if you could tell us when you started writing these diaries.

— A long, long time ago. The first diary entry is from 2005.

He was twenty years younger than he is now.

— It was a delicate time. I was leaving my husband. I started the diary when our relationship was ending and followed it for almost a decade. Getting divorced when I was only 28 was both shocking and inspiring. I kept wondering why I made so many mistakes.

2005 was also the year in which you published Ticknor, your first novel.

— In another interview about these diets they mentioned it to me. Ticknor It was my first book published by a major publishing house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It allowed me to travel to many places and gave me self-confidence. At the same time, my personal life was falling apart.

It reminds me of the emotional ups and downs of the protagonist of How a person should be.

— The diaries were a response to that book. I was happy because it had turned out the way I wanted, but at the same time I was aware that I had to invent a novel plot that was false. The protagonist, Sheila, betrayed Margaux and then went to New York, where she had to try to regain her friend's trust. When I now return to How a person should beI'm not entirely comfortable with the more plot-driven scenes in the book. With the diaries, I focused on eliminating the plot.

Because?

— Life lacks the plot of a novel. By writing the diary, I wanted to approach a more realistic representation of life.

When did you start thinking about alphabetizing the diary?

— It must have been around 2012 or 2013, after publishing How a person should be. I still wrote a few diary entries for a couple of years while I was falling in love with my current partner and trying to find ways to organize all the material I had. When I decided to go alphabetically, I wrote Maternity In parallel. To pay the bills, I work on several projects at once. I also write articles and reports, do live interviews...

There is a significant editing process, in this alphabetical order, right?

— Yes. The first version was about 500,000 words long, nine times longer than the current version, which is about 55,000. It was about eliminating and retouching phrases so that the remaining ones would resonate in a special and unexpected way.

The book reads more like a prose poem than a diary.

— That was the intention. I take it as a kind of autopsy of myself over that entire decade.

I read in an interview that some of the writers you showed the project to gave you lukewarm feedback. How did they discourage you and, at the same time, how did they make you persist until you published the book?

— One of the first people I taught was Tao Lin Because he's open-minded when it comes to reading unusual literary forms. Also because when he discusses books, he's honest without being destructive. When we spoke, he told me it was fine, but it had taken him a long time to get to the end, and that made me think I should keep cutting sentences. In total, it would take me ten years.

In your diaries, you write about how difficult it is for you to write, about the reading you're doing, you make observations about the places you travel to, and you also tell us, without sparing any details, about sexual relationships with men and women. Reading about bisexuality now attracts less attention than it did fifteen years ago, right?

— Yes, I totally agree. One of the things that impresses me most about getting older is seeing how quickly culture changes. I didn't realize that before. If you look back, the 1950s are very different from the 1970s, but when you experience it firsthand, it's even more impactful.

What other major changes would you highlight?

— Everything related to the Internet and artificial intelligence. Mobile phones twenty years ago were very rudimentary.

And in relation to literature?

— Twenty years ago, naming a character after yourself seemed crazy. Of course, it had been done before, I'm aware of that, but it was a reckless act. The consequences were unexpected.

And now?

— Now everyone does it. First person has become boring. It's lost its energy and its power.

Where do you think literary interest is now?

— In pure imagination, expressed radically. This is what motivates me now, even though there are autobiographical books that still interest me, like now. The perfections, by Vincenzo Latronico [Anagrama, 2023], and In the house of dreams, of Carmen Maria Machado [Anagrama, 2021].

One of the quotes in the diary talks about how culture demands that women be "the more mediocre the better." Would you say this has changed?

— What I think has changed is how the number of women writers who help each other has grown. Perhaps it was like that before, but I didn't have that perception. Twenty years ago, an author like Rachel Cusk She was critically scorned for her book on divorce. Now, no one doubts that she writes literature with a capital L. It's even been accepted that the book was very good.