Quick Take
- Narration: Kate Berlant is inspired casting, her comedic timing and instinctive sense of rhythm make the alphabetical ruptures feel playful rather than academic, and she matches Heti’s shifts from despair to desire without missing a beat.
- Themes: Consciousness and self-examination, desire and creative labor, the arbitrariness of narrative order
- Mood: Restless, funny, disconcerting, occasionally gorgeous
- Verdict: A conceptual memoir that is surprisingly easy to listen to, Berlant earns every minute of the format’s strangeness.
I started Alphabetical Diaries on a commute and immediately had the experience of needing to rewind, not because I had missed anything but because a sentence had landed so unexpectedly that I wanted to hear it again. That is a specific audiobook phenomenon, and it happened more than once over the five and a half hours of this recording. Sheila Heti kept a diary for ten years, then took every sentence from that diary and arranged them in strict alphabetical order by first word. The result should be alienating. It is, instead, oddly absorbing.
The formal conceit strips away causality and narrative logic. You cannot follow a story because there is no story in the conventional sense, only an accumulation of moments organized by the arbitrary sequence of the alphabet. Sentences about sexual desire sit next to sentences about literary criticism sit next to sentences about insomnia sit next to observations about friends and enemies whose names recur throughout but whose stories never cohere into a through line. What you get instead is something closer to the actual texture of a mind: associative, contradictory, surprisingly funny, sometimes devastating.
The Alphabet as a Structural Argument
Heti is not the first writer to experiment with constraint-based structures, and Alphabetical Diaries belongs to a tradition that includes Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual and various Oulipo experiments in form. But where those works tend toward cool intellectualism, Heti’s project is warmly confessional. The alphabetical arrangement does not feel like an academic exercise because the material underneath it is so nakedly personal. One reviewer called it an incredible work of art and recommended it especially to writers, women, and the romantically restless, and that combination gives you a reasonable map of the book’s emotional territory. It covers desire, ambition, doubt, envy, and the slow work of trying to understand what one wants from life and whether writing is actually a way to find it.
What Kate Berlant Brings to a Fragmented Text
An alphabetically arranged diary is, on the page, a challenging read. In audio form, under Kate Berlant’s narration, it becomes something else entirely. Vulture noted that Berlant adds extra pizazz, and the observation is accurate, though pizazz might undersell what she actually does. Berlant has the rare ability to deliver a sentence as if she is discovering its meaning in the act of saying it, which is exactly what this material requires. Heti’s sentences often turn on themselves or end somewhere other than where they seemed to be going, and Berlant catches those turns. Her background in comedy gives her a sensitivity to rhythm and surprise that a more formally trained narrator might not have brought. AudioFile noted that Heti’s candid revelations will stir listeners, and the stirring is inseparable from Berlant’s delivery.
The Limits of the Format and Who Notices Them
Not every listener will find this approach rewarding. The book resists immersion in the way that conventional memoir invites it. You cannot lose yourself in a narrative because there is no narrative to lose yourself in. What the format offers instead is a kind of suspended attention, a willingness to receive sentences as individual units rather than building blocks toward something larger. The alphabetical structure is clearer as a concept when you can see the page and track the letters. In audio, the organizing principle can feel invisible at times, leaving you with something that sounds like a very fragmented stream of consciousness without the formal key that explains why it is fragmented. That said, the book works as audio even if the alphabetical logic occasionally recedes. The sentences are good enough to carry the experience on their own.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Alphabetical Diaries rewards listeners who are comfortable with difficulty and interested in what happens when you remove narrative from memoir and see what is left. It rewards writers who have kept diaries and recognize the texture of their own private language in Heti’s. It rewards fans of Berlant looking for audio work that suits her particular gifts. Those looking for a shapely life story with a beginning and a resolution will find this frustrating. Those expecting something gentle or therapeutic should know that Heti is not writing for comfort. She is writing to see, and sometimes what she sees is not easy to hear.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you actually hear the alphabetical arrangement in the audiobook, or does it disappear in audio form?
The alphabetical structure is audible as a kind of rhythm rather than as a visible organizational principle. You notice sudden shifts and juxtapositions that would not occur in conventional diary writing, and attentive listeners will hear sections where sentences cluster around the same starting letter. But you lose the visual clarity that the page provides, which is a genuine trade-off.
How long is the listening run and is it best taken in one sitting or in fragments?
The audiobook runs just over five and a half hours. Given the fragmented structure, it actually suits listening in shorter sessions better than many audiobooks. There are no chapters to lose track of and no narrative thread to reconstruct, which means you can stop and start without penalty.
Is this related to Heti’s other work, or does it stand completely alone?
Alphabetical Diaries stands alone and requires no prior knowledge of Heti’s fiction. That said, readers who know How Should a Person Be? or Motherhood will recognize shared preoccupations: the relationship between art and life, the ethics of using real people as material, and the recurring question of what a woman is supposed to want.
Does Kate Berlant read the entire text, or are there other narrators?
Kate Berlant reads the entire audiobook solo. The single-narrator format suits the material well, since the text is structured as a unified consciousness even if its logical continuity is broken by the alphabetical arrangement.
