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 Heddie 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? Help launch the trend

that's called auto fiction, books that twist and blur the boundaries

between the novel and the memoir.

Writing about Hedy's last book, the New Yorker's critic, Parle said, called out her works whimsical self-consciousness and its preoccupation

with mysticism, questions of faith, and ethics.

To me, Sheila Hetti 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 Parle 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 Hedy's career which has been marked by so many kinds of formal innovation

it has a freshness and surprise all its own.

I think this is your 11th book yeah right alphabetical diaries is your 11th book. Yeah.

...