Alphabetical Diaries — 2024 ACX Book Review Contest Entry

A beginning page encapsulating the novel itself. A beginning page that feels like the output of an LLM, but — can you tell? — isn’t quite. A beginning page worth reading every sentence of.

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 which was going to the ferry, but because I…

Alphabetical Diaries, a book by Sheila Heti, is genre-transcending and profound: it feels like reading the raw files of a person’s consciousness, while meditating on the nature of the English language.

Alphabetical Diaries, Alphabetically Reviewed.

Anecdotes provide levity. Aphorisms provide depth. Art unites the motivation of the author and reader. As artistic as the text is the book’s premise, which you might be able to figure out from the quote. At this point, though, I’ll explain.

Basically, Sheila Heti wrote 500,000 words in her diary from approximately 2004 to 2014, then exported the sentences to an Excel spreadsheet — and sorted the sentences in alphabetical order! Before I started reading, I was intrigued by this concept, but couldn’t figure out how it would remain interesting. But as I began, I sometimes found myself forgetting that the sentences were alphabetized. But this makes sense because of something I haven’t told you: after alphabetizing, Heti cut almost 90% of the sentences, reducing the length to 60,000 words, and that’s what became Alphabetical Diaries. By cleverly using the degrees of freedom the process afforded, she often strings sentences together that read like a continuous narrative — until the next sentence jolts you out of the fiction, reminding you that the previous sentences were probably written years apart. 

Call it random chance, but alphabetical order has clear patterns, which give the reader context. Chance wouldn’t juxtapose sentences and sentences that each begin with the same word, would it? Chance wouldn’t juxtapose whole pages about a single character: there’s Agnes, there’s Claire, and surely there will later be vast sections on Lars and Pavel, boyfriends of the author who she harbors strongly mixed feelings about. (Characters’ pseudonyms provide another degree of freedom for the author: she can use a pseudonym to insert someone’s section wherever in the alphabet packs the most punch.) Could chance have ended the chapters — there is a chapter for each letter, Chapter A, Chapter B, Chapter C, each beginning with a big first letter like a dictionary or 16th-century manuscript — so artistically?

Crazy to spend ninety dollars on the scarf—but I’m crazy! Create the fiction. Crushes on men. Crying about Lars. Curiosity is not a good reason to get married.

Definitely I’m hooked. Definitely, though, I wish the book was about something other than Sheila Heti, a noted author but one I’d never heard of — and not because there’s anything wrong with Heti but because it could’ve been a cool opportunity to learn deeply about something else.

Each sentence you read is another data point into her consciousness. Effectively, you can predict the rhythm; an anecdote, an aphorism, a sexual encounter with a man, a description of how she wants a sexual encounter with another man, a sense of revulsion over thinking so much (so much) about her sex life instead of writing her novels. Eliezer Yudkowsky (look, I originally wrote this for the Astral Codex Ten book review contest, so I was pandering, and anyway his name fits in this alphabetical slot) could write his own Alphabetical Diaries, and we would all better understand the lived experience of being an inter-temporal Eliezer Yudkowsky, his eccentricities and his sharp changes in opinion around AI, all interspersed. Every person who journals enough could write their own Alphabetical Diaries, and if I knew you I’d probably enjoy reading it! Every work of literature from Harry Potter to the Constitution could form its own Alphabetical Diaries, and I’d probably enjoy reading it. Except: I do grant that the years and craft spent by Heti make the chapters fluid and fun and readable. Excited as I may be to read your own Alphabetical Diaries, the original work feels like the gold standard, and so we must make do with the insights we get.

First of all, let us think about the alphabet. First letters don’t have the same frequency distribution as letters overall, and first letters in sentences have a distribution that is different still. 

G is one good example. G is worth 2 points in Scrabble, while B (for example) is worth 3, but Chapter G is much shorter: three pages to B’s seven. Get this: words, and especially sentences, containing B are more likely to have it at the beginning — heavy hitters include before, but, and by. Go over to G, on the other hand, and get and go are the best you can do: the letter’s low Scrabble point value is due largely to the suffix -ing, which doesn’t help its page count, despite characters such as Gil and Giovanna. 

Heti messes up in Chapter H. Hiding in a sea of sentences beginning “Hanif said,” the author puts “Hanif told him not to buy a house on the coast line, that coast lines everywhere will be gone in twenty years.” How did this error slip in? However insane the later sentence “Hanif said that a man’s sexuality is to have a wife and mistress, both” is, I’m convinced there’s no meaning other than a mis-drag of spreadsheet quotes or a sketchy copy edit. However it happened doesn’t matter. However it happened, I’m bracing myself for the behemoth of all chapters, the one that delves deepest into the true subject of the book: the aestheticized diarist. Humongous paragraph coming up in this review…brace yourself. 

I am a blogger without a large audience. I am a forecaster on Manifold Markets. I am a guy who has always harbored fantasies of my life as some kind of futarchic Truman Show, where the viewers at home see what I do and develop opinions and bet on prediction markets on it. I am a math nerd and a wordplay fan and a puzzle creator. I am a reluctant Swiftie; a Swiftie because her music entered my brain often enough that it developed meaning. I am confident in myself but not as much as I let on, especially when it’s dark and I’m alone with my thoughts and especially when I’ve been unproductive again. I am deserving of some of the fortune I’ve experienced in my life but certainly not all of it, and I feel like I should give more to charity, but I currently have no idea which charity is most “effective” amid all this existential risk and don’t know what I should do. I am frequently having thoughts that I don’t identify with, thoughts that I wish would go away. I am like, “Brain, stop having these thoughts, they’re not useful.” I am not going to write a book containing all of them, except that a part of me wants to. I am on Chapter I of Alphabetical Diaries. I am planning to maybe write a review of the book for the Astral Codex Ten book review contest where the sentences are in alphabetical order, partially to do justice to the concept of the novel but partially because I know I can. I am quite aware of the fact that this only does partial justice to the concept of the novel because my sentences are not sourced from any kind of corpus, unless you consider the set of all sentences in my mind that I could plausibly write in a book review to be a corpus. I am reading a book about a woman who is describing her deep inner self, a deep inner self which is unlike mine but which has the same revulsion, the same lampshading, and the same desire for comedy.

I am sad. I am scared. I am sick of this going-nowhereness, these games … I am so sick of myself and all my thoughts, circles, fears, and worries. I am so tired I want to die … I am starting to feel sorry for Pavel for having a girlfriend like me … I am thinking about giving up my crushes. I am thinking again about Lars … I am tired as hell right now … I am tired of always pushing myself, pushing myself. I am tired of feeling so tired all the time, so depressed and wanting to cry … I apologized to him, and now there is just the rest of my life.

I can predict what will come next: Lars, Pavel, Lars, Pavel, Vig, Gil, Lars, Pavel, mundane observation, guilt over not writing novels. I don’t want to be inside the diarist’s mind anymore, all of a sudden. I don’t want to hear any more anecdotes or aphorisms or discussions of how she hates the men that she is inexorably attracted to. I feel disdain. I feel empathy for her revulsion to her own obsession, but I still feel the same revulsion to her obsession. I guess I should clarify that I have nothing against sexualization per se; I would have the same disdain for a part of a book that is obsessed with something vapid but non-sexual, such as whales, and in fact I have this exact disdain for Moby-Dick, which I read recently. I keep reading Alphabetical Diaries because I’m not sure that I endorse my negative feelings, and I’m not sure if they’re really grounded in anything other than a bad mood. I maintain that the purpose of reading it is to have the experience of being inside a person’s mind, and that it is virtuous to truly understand a person. I refuse to make this a short or impersonal paragraph, but perhaps I shouldn’t refuse and in fact should cut it down. I still want to convey to you how Chapter I felt to me, like something that was unending, something that stretches down the entire page. I survive only because there is a clear progress bar, the sentences keep increasing lexicographically, and it feels like any moment we will reach J. I survived, earlier, the page or two about each individual person, but I can barely survive her self. I think about abandoning the book, but I am almost out of the worst of it. I underwent a phase change in my feelings about Alphabetical Diaries. I usually am not like this. I wasn’t sure if it was the book or me. 

“Ice cream was served” comes suddenly, with an atypical paragraph break after the sentences beginning with the word I. It feels like I am taking a breath of fresh air. It is a short chapter, now, and I am halfway through the book. It won’t be the same as it was for the rest of the book.

Jettison everything, but you can’t escape the self. Just keep calm and carry on. 

Keep calm and keep reading, since I’ve decided that I’m going to spend some time comparing LLM output to Alphabetical Diaries...

Large language models take in big corpora of sentences and rearrange them to tell stories we’re interested in hearing. Less of their content provides actual information, though, especially when people ask for things like “Write a three paragraph letter firing John politely,” and what effect does this have? Limiting the AI output to conveying a sentence’s worth of entropy. Literary analysis is built on the idea that it is worthwhile to analyze text closely, that we gain insight from slicing and dicing and fileting and sauteeing text. LLMs are not optimized to convey a meaning, they are optimized to predict the next token and to sound like text, and so it would seem that analyzing every word is worthless.

Machine learning algorithms, though, involve training on a lot of data, perhaps more data than Sheila Heti encountered between the years 2004 and 2014. Meaning in their output doesn’t have to come from the prompt: perhaps it comes from the trillions of words in its training data. Mechanistic interpretability research could be able to reinterpret quirks of LLM text — its love of the word “delve,” its propensity to describe a novel as a “rich tapestry” — as deep observations about our society, or about the revealed preferences of the people who performed reinforcement-learning-from-human-feedback on it. Might it be that they have? Mostly I wonder whether LLMs, in the next ten years, will produce not just text but a representation of a complex idea in text form. (My goalposts might shift. My intention is for them to remain constant, but I’m not sure I have the clarity of mind.)

Narratives, of all the types of written word, seem to influence humans most powerfully; more powerfully even than data-driven arguments. Narrativization permeates the words of AI, who are writing words for words’ sake as opposed to expressing a self. Novels tell narratives too; while sometimes complex and multilayered, they nonetheless often reflect the selective memories of those writing the narratives.

Of all the days from 2004 to 2014, if one didn’t fit the pattern that Heti retroactively ascribed to her life in that week or month, if she was writing a novel it might have been excluded, but if she had written in her diary, it made it into Alphabetical Diaries. Or maybe she edited it out, but at least she looked at it … one would hope.

Pavel gets his pages-long coverage in Chapter P, but it doesn’t make me feel anything. Pavel has been a presence throughout the book, one of the protagonist’s two main turbulent boyfriends, probably worse than Lars. Pavel was bad but somehow not as bad as I’d worried. Pavel was someone who filled niches for her. Pavel was terrible though. People should have the experience of seeing a sample of their selves. Perhaps I’ll publish a computer program where you can enter text and it will Alphabetical Diaries-ify it, to get this feeling. Perhaps one of you will do it. 

Questioned in interviews about her favorite part of the book, Heti brings up the ephemeral Chapter Q.

Quiet days, not seeing people, feeling fine.

Quotidian category, but those are the rarest and most precious. Quoting it, she wishes for more quiet days, not seeing people, feeling fine.

Reflect about how many quiet days you’ve had, not seeing people, feeling fine. Reflect about the last ten years of your life. Reflect about your life between 2004 and 2014, when Heti wrote her diaries. Reflect on what your Alphabetical Diaries would be like for those years. Reflect that across the present date, into the period from 2034 to 2044. Refract that into a different medium entirely, into whatever technology becomes the norm. Remember how you felt a decade ago. Remember what you thought was plausible. Remind yourself, by scheduling an email to 2034, to look back at your life alphabetically to see the ways in which you were wrong. 

Schedule an email, it’ll take one minute! Schedule it and you will see in ten years that you won’t remain the protagonist.

Sheila Heti.

Sheila Heti authored Alphabetical Diaries, but she is the protagonist no longer. Sheila Heti from 2004 to 2014 is not the protagonist either. Sheila Heti in an interview makes the point that she tended only to write in her diary when her feelings were particularly intense. Sheila Heti styled the book like a novel to evoke a sense of narrative, to aestheticize her past self’s strongest feelings. Sheila Heti wrote every sentence of Alphabetical Diaries about the world she inhabited, but the sample of the world is highly nonrandom. Statistically, Heti’s omissions should include the confusing, the shameful and the mundane.

The funny thing is that the book is filled with the confusing, the shameful and the mundane. The premise, as exquisite as it is, grew inevitably tiresome for me over the 212 pages, even separated from the existential crisis of Chapter I. “Twenty-six paragraphs?” said my friend when I mentioned that the book review I was writing would feature a paragraph for every letter of the alphabet. “Two thousand words is the historical minimum,” I said, or perhaps something that doesn’t precisely follow my friend’s question alphabetically, but the essence is the same. Tying the objective of a book review to length can be a bad idea.

Undertaking the construction of Alphabetical Diaries took over a decade — Heti technically made the spreadsheet before the last diary entries were written, but since the project didn’t feel real, she says in interviews that it didn’t affect her writing — and she would often work on the project here and there when she didn’t feel like doing other things. Until the end, there was a line break after each sentence; they weren’t arranged in narrativistic paragraphs like this. 

Very late in the process, as the novel was about to be finished, Heti spent a 10-day stretch doing nothing but working on the project, to make sure that all the threads were placed properly. 

What does it mean for all the threads to be placed properly? When will the threads in our lives intertwine in just the most satisfying ways? Where should we go forward, when we have examined our pasts in such an aesthetic manner? Who can say? Why are we all still here?

X-risks are not a topic in Alphabetical Diaries. 

Yet maybe they’re more important than everything that is. You just spent perhaps ten minutes of your life reading a stunt review of a stunt book. You maybe wonder what you learned from it, whether it counts to say gained some kind of ineffable appreciation for semi-random sampling. You might be waiting to hear what the conclusion is, just like I was waiting to hear what the conclusion was of Alphabetical Diaries, but it doesn’t have a conclusion, because the sentences are no longer alive, and Chapter Y concludes with the author lampshading her self-hatred. You should consider using this moment as an impetus to feel a sense of aestheticized calm — then to go do that thing that you know you should do. You would know better than me. You’re you.

(“Zadie Smith’s husband,” if you’re still here, begins the final sentence of Alphabetical Diaries, one of the neatest and tidiest sentences in the book (second only to those about writing novels): an aphorism about relationships embedded with an anecdote; I won’t spoil it. Zen of her to end like that, plopping the reader back to normality. Zero sentences come after it. Zilch. Zones of alphabetical sentences exist that are untouched by Sheila Heti’s semi-random sampling. Zoos full of words, begging for us to reach them. Zorn’s lemma implies we can choose an element from even an uncountably infinite set, so we could always choose a sentence to write, but the set of sentences is countable and also easy to choose elements from (take this one, if you want) so Zorn’s lemma is really irrelevant here. Zorn’s lemma, even if it were applicable, still doesn’t promise that the sentence is random…yet it evokes a flavor of randomness, analogous to how Alphabetical Diaries evokes a flavor of randomness, but its sentences define humanity just as a dictionary does.)