This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Sheila Hetty is the kind of novelist that people talk about and have really strong opinions about, too.

She's been very influential in the literary world and well beyond. Her book, How Should a Person Be?

From 2010, helped launch the trend that's called auto-fiction, books that twist and blur the

boundaries between the novel and the memoir.

Writing about Hetty's last book,

the New Yorker's critic Parles Sagle called out her work's whimsical self-consciousness

and its preoccupation with mysticism, questions of faith, and ethics.

To me, Sheila Heady is one of the most interesting novelists working today.

She is ruthlessly contemporary, by which I mean she's not interested in writing a novel as a nostalgic exercise.

She's constantly trying to figure out new places fiction can go, new ways that we're using language,

new ways that our minds are evolving.

Here's Parles Sago.

Her newest book is titled Alphabetical Diaries.

She draws from 10 years of her diaries that she kept, and she took sentences, questions, little moments from her

diaries and has woven them into a new text that has all the best characteristics of a diary.

It feels very intimate.

It feels private.

It feels charged with all the kinds of questions you can only bring to your diary.

And she makes of it a separate

kind of novel populated with characters that emerge from her own life. I think even in Hetty's

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