Sheila Heti, ALPHABETICAL DIARIES

Totally Booked with Zibby

Zibby Owens

Connection, Inspiration, Moms, Entertainment, Arts, Reading, Books, Parenting, Literary

4.4 • 602 Ratings

🗓️ 3 March 2024

⏱️ 16 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sheila Heti, the award-winning author of PURE COLOUR, joins Zibby to chat about her new book, ALPHABETICAL DIARIES, a passionate, reflective, and joyful collection of thoughts she gathered over a ten-year period, and then arranged from A to Z. Sheila describes her creative process, explaining how she explored patterns and repetitions while alphabetizing her diary entries. She and Zibby also delve into the essence of the self, the surprising continuity of personal identity over time, the challenges of editing such an unconventional project, and the allure of reading someone else’s diary. Finally, Sheila shares her best advice for aspiring authors.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books with Zivie. I'm the host, Zivie Owens. I am an author. My latest is blank,
0:11.9	pub date March 1st, a novel. I'm also a podcaster, obviously, a publisher, a bookstore owner,
0:17.8	and so much more. If you love books, you're in the right place. In fact, we call it
0:22.6	the Zivieverse, or really, the L.A. Times called it the Zibiverse, and we're going with it.
0:27.1	Go to Zivie Owens.com to learn more and follow me on Instagram at Zivie Owens.
0:33.5	Sheila Heddy is the author of Alphabetical Diaries. Sheila is the author of 11 books, including the novels Pure Color, Motherhood, and How Should a Person Be, which New York deemed one of the new classics of the 21st century.
0:45.9	She was named one of the new vanguard by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose motherhood as a top book of 2018.
0:54.6	Her books have been translated into 24 languages.
0:57.1	She lives in Toronto.
0:58.4	Welcome, Sheila.
0:59.6	Thank you so much for coming on moms
1:01.4	and have time to read books.
1:02.8	Now to discuss alphabetical diaries, which is so creative
1:07.2	and the coolest idea for a book ever.
1:10.6	So why don't you tell listeners how you came up with this?
1:13.8	I'm not really sure how I came up with it, but in 2010 I started this project.
1:19.2	And it was this question of like, what would my diaries look like if they were alphabetized by sentence?
1:24.3	If I sort of broke it apart, broke apart the chronology and just read like, yeah,
1:30.6	I hate him.
1:32.3	I hate him.
1:33.1	I hate him written like over 10 years.
1:36.7	And yeah, so I was, I guess, trying to look at the past years of my life and see what the patterns
	...

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