Sentences that once sat months apart now sit shoulder to shoulder because they happen to begin with the same letter. Sheila Heti kept a record of her thoughts across a ten-year stretch, then sorted every sentence from A to Z, and Macmillan Audio turned the result into a five-hour-and-twenty-six-minute audiobook read by Kate Berlant. I went in expecting a stunt and came out with something closer to a machine for stripping context out of a life. The question that stayed with me afterward is whether removing the chronology from a diary reveals a person more clearly, or only reveals the alphabet.
A Lover Beside a Landlord, Alphabetically
Alphabetization does what no editor would dare do on purpose. It sets a sentence about a lover beside a sentence about a landlord, and the only relationship between them is the first letter. Because the sorting is mechanical rather than curated, whole stretches turn into accidental catalogs: every sentence opening with I arrives in one long block, every sentence built on the same verb piles up behind it, and repetition nobody designed starts to sound like testimony given under oath. Heti did not write those effects. She released them, and then declined to intervene.
An Exposition of How We Use Language
One five-star response calls the book an exposition of how we use language, thrilling and shocking and sad by turns, and that is still the most accurate short description of it I have come across. The subject is not really a decade of one writer's life. The subject is the sentence as a unit of self-presentation, and what becomes visible when you delete every connective that once made a person sound reasonable. Read that way, the alphabet is not a gimmick imposed on a diary; it is a filter that removes the writer's ability to explain herself, and what survives the filter is whatever she could not stop putting down.
Stripped of sequence, the material reorganizes itself into obsessions rather than events. Despair returns. Desire returns. So do the stray literary facts a chronological diary would have spaced out politely across ten years. Five hours and twenty-six minutes is brief for a memoir and exactly the right length for this one, because the form punishes anything longer. By the time the recording works through the back half of the alphabet you have stopped listening for a year and started listening for a mind, which is a genuinely unusual thing for a book to teach you to do mid-listen.
Kate Berlant's Comic Timing Holds It Together
A book assembled from sentences that do not depend on one another is unusually forgiving in audio. Lose four minutes to a phone call and you lose nothing, because nothing was accumulating. Most literary nonfiction punishes an interrupted listen, and this punishes none at all, which makes a strong practical case for the recorded edition over the printed one. The trade-off is real but small: you cannot flip back, and you will want to flip back, because two or three sentences an hour land hard enough to stop you.
A five-star entry filed in March 2024 reaches the same conclusion from the opposite direction. Its writer describes a short-term memory that no longer holds a narrative and says a book of self-contained sentences was therefore made to order, each line carrying its own charm or disgust without needing the one before it. I had not considered that use case and cannot argue with it. It also quietly identifies who this book is easiest for: anyone who reads in fragments already.
Kate Berlant carries the recording, and the copy identifies her as an Emmy-nominated comedian, actress and writer rather than a career reader, which tells you what the production was reaching for. A trade quote reproduced on the listing credits Berlant with adding extra pizazz so a listener gets a window into a creative mind shifting quickly between despair, insight and desire. Read that as the publicity it is, but the casting logic underneath holds up: comic timing is close to the only tool that makes a run of orphaned sentences land, and a neutral reading would have flattened the whole book into an inventory.
A Written Column Unusually Split Down the Middle
Not everyone thinks the casting works. A three-star entry from February 2024 grades the book component by component, hands the narration a C, and puts the objection precisely: the reading often made the material feel like a dramatic novel rather than a journal, and the alphabetical arrangement made the writer's life impossible to follow. That same entry files the title as Alphabet Diaries, which is not the name on the cover, so the record carries a small transcription slip inside its most detailed response.
Whether that objection describes a flaw or the entire point is a question the book declines to settle. Removing chronology from a diary removes the one service a diary performs. Anyone arriving hoping to learn what happened to Heti between one year and the next will be actively obstructed, and the obstruction is deliberate. Candor runs constant rather than confined to a chapter, sexual material included, and since no sentence is cushioned by the one before it, each arrival is abrupt by design. This is headphone listening.
The written column is unusually split for a listing showing 4.0 across eighty-eight votes. One entry stops at a single star without finishing, calls the idea better than the contents, and mentions better diaries elsewhere without naming one. Three sit at five. A three sits in between. Five responses producing that spread do not describe a book with a consensus problem; they describe a book that works completely or does not work at all, and nothing in a summary can tell you in advance which side you will land on.
A Performance With a Personality of Its Own
Readers who care about form more than plot are the core audience, and one five-star response draws the circle tighter than I would have: writers, women, and anyone who has ever been restless romantically. I would add anyone who has kept a journal and later been embarrassed by it, since this is what a journal looks like once the excuses have been sorted away from the confessions. Admirers of Pure Colour, named on the listing as the previous book, will recognize the sensibility even though the method has nothing in common with it.
Skip it if you need a story with a beginning, or if you want a reader who disappears into the text, because this performance has a personality and spends it freely. Two long-listings from 2024 sit at the top of the description and they are accurate about the ambition rather than the experience. Everyone else should come for the sentences and accept that the decade behind them has been shredded on purpose, which is the only condition under which the whole thing makes sense.
Does the A-to-Z arrangement survive as an audiobook, or does it need the page?
It survives, and in one respect it improves. Sorting removes any reason to move forward, so an interrupted listen costs you nothing at all. What you give up is the ability to go back to a sentence that landed, and across five hours and twenty-six minutes you will want to more than once.
Is Kate Berlant a straight reader or a performer here?
The listing credits her as an Emmy-nominated comedian, actress and writer, and the reading reflects that casting rather than a neutral house style. One three-star response objected that it turned journal entries into something closer to staged fiction and graded the narration a C, which describes the approach fairly even if you disagree with the verdict.
How explicit does this audiobook get?
Candid enough that the quoted praise on the listing names incidents of sexual desire alongside despair and stray literary facts. Nothing is dwelt on, since no sentence gets more than its own line, but the frankness is constant instead of confined to a chapter. Treat it as private listening.
Do I need to have read Sheila Heti before starting?
No. The listing points to Pure Colour as the previous book and carries two long-listings from 2024, but nothing here depends on either. If anything this is the wrong entry point to her fiction and the right one for anyone curious about what a diary becomes once its chronology has been taken away.
