As a creative writer myself, there aren’t too many titles that faze me anymore. “Curiosity is not a good reason to get married,” the title of the first segment of Sheila Heti’s serialized creative piece for the “New York Times”, caught my attention. The rest of the piece didn’t disappoint.
The premise is incredibly creative: an alphabetized collection of sentences from Heti’s journal entries, tracing back over the last decade. Heti reported loading 500,000 words into Excel to order them alphabetically before editing them for aesthetics. The result is a novelistic, characterized work of fiction with a stream-of-consciousness realism and relatable insight into human nature and ideals.
The piece features characters such as Lark, Lemons, and Pavel, as well as the narrator, who takes on an ethereal yet relatable quality. The issues and questions the narrator wrestles with are universal and generally applicable – any of us may encounter them in our lives – but many are specific enough that they don’t feel too lofty.
Many lines are intriguing and unexplained: “Knocked my tooth out this morning, and I can’t find my gold coin,” “Last night I made him walk down the street as though he didn’t know me,” or “Don’t take yourself so seriously; don’t think about yourself at all,” for example.
Many more lines feel like cautionary advice from a vague older sister: “Don’t make up stories. Don’t make yourself a God. Don’t make yourself into a demon,” “Art is not essential, but love is essential, and that’s why many people make art, to express their love of something,” or, “As I write this, I know that this is just a moment of high confidence which certainly will pass.”
Many of the lines are simply intriguing: “At the end of the conversation, Lemons said, ‘Well anyway, I just wanted to tell you about my dilemma,’ but it wasn’t a dilemma at all,” “Because I couldn’t leave, I tried to find the dinner party interesting, but I was unable to find anything interesting about Lemons’s new girlfriend,” “Because I will probably ruin my life,” and “Because it is a pattern, and the pattern is: be with me, desire Alice, be with Alice, desire me” were just a few of the many lines I wish I knew the context of.
The aesthetics of the work itself is also striking. Photography by Yael Malka, included in every section, adds a dramatic visual to complement the words. In my first reading of the first section (containing sentences beginning with letters A-C), I felt they were abrasive – that they took me out of the story – but as I read the section again, they feel more cohesive, like a reflective reprieve from the lines of text.
A second note on aesthetics – each section is written in white text, on top of a color-changing background. The background of the web page changes color so subtly it isn’t distracting, but I’ve enjoyed reflecting on how the color might affect the mood of the piece – if it was really as intentional as that, or if it was random.
To commit to reading the whole series is more time consuming, but I would recommend reading at least one of the sections. Their wit, creativity, and resonance make them a rewarding read; a look into a fictionalized life both humanized and objective.
At the time of this writing, four parts of the ten part series have been released. The first section can be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/09/opinion/sheila-heti-alphabetized-diary-abc.html