What Have You Learned from Re-Reading Your Diary?

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 13 February 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“A little more than 10 years ago, I began looking back at the diaries I had kept over the previous decade. I wondered if I’d changed. So I loaded all 500,000 words of my journals into Excel to order the sentences alphabetically.” That’s how author Sheila Heti describes the origins of the decade-long project that would become her latest book, “Alphabetical Diaries.” When she reviewed those sentences sorted on a spreadsheet, Heti says she found a constant self — one preoccupied across time with the same worries about writing, money and love. We talk to her about what revisiting and reorganizing her diary entries revealed about her own consistencies and contradictions. And we’ll hear from you: What have you learned from re-reading your diaries? Guests: Sheila Heti, author, “Alphabetical Diaries,” “Motherhood,” “Pure Colour” and “How Should A Person Be?” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for Forum comes from Rancho La Puerta, boated the number one wellness resort and spa by readers of travel and leisure magazine in 2024.
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0:45.3	... From KQBD in San Francisco, this is Forum.
1:02.1	I'm Mina Kim.
1:03.3	More than a decade ago, writer Sheila Hetty, known for her true-to-life reflections and works like motherhood and pure color,
1:09.9	began looking back at her old diaries and
1:11.9	wondering if she'd changed. She loaded them into Excel, alphabetized the sentences, and after
1:17.7	editing the 500,000 words down to about 60,000, produced her latest work, alphabetical
1:23.5	diaries. We'll hear what Hedy learned from the project about both her consistencies and
1:28.0	contradictions, about how our minds work. And we want to hear from you. What have you learned
1:33.1	from revisiting your diaries? Join us. Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. For her new book, Alphabetical Diaries, writer Sheila Hetty, took 10 years' worth of digital diary entries, loaded them into an Excel spreadsheet, and alphabetized them by sentence. The result, sentences read together that could have been written days, even years apart.
2:04.0	And yet, by pairing them down, while always maintaining alphabetical order, Hetty found recurring themes,
	...

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