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When I think of the sheer joy of reading, I’m picturing my Grandmother. A heavy Hilary Mantel in hand, she’s placed her soft palm over the page to conceal the lines she is yet to read.

Transfixed and impatient to know what will happen next, she’s physically holding herself back from racing ahead. I’m enthralled at the sight; at this alchemy of masterful storytelling in action – solace, escapism and immediacy – all at once.

In Alphabetical Diaries, Sheila Heti pulls the conventions of plot and pacing apart at the seams. Between books, and in need of raw material to play with, Heti typed ten years’ worth of diary entries into an Excel spreadsheet, then ordered her sentences alphabetically. She spent the subsequent ten years culling and refining, until around a tenth of her original text remained. More so sculpting than writing, she carved out generative spaces, allowing for an incidental kind of beauty to emerge.

The opening chapter offers a succession of enticing hints as to Heti’s intent:

A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain. A book can be about more than one thing, like a kaleidoscope.

Thereafter, there is much satisfaction to be found in seeking out serendipitous patterns and atmospheres distinctive to each section – the didactic dos and don’ts of the fourth; the uncompromising questioning of the whats and whys; the imitative minimalism of Q’s single sentence – “Quiet days, not seeing people, feeling fine.”

Somehow, these juxtaposed confessions appear much less absurd and incongruous than we might expect, given the absence of a causal or chronological relation between them. This rejection of suspense and contrived propulsion is certainly estranging, but uniquely mesmeric and revelatory too.

While reading Heti’s abecedarian thoughts, my music teacher comes to mind. He’s telling us about harmonic tension and release, playing a series of progressions on the piano as he explains the concept of fruitful dissonance. It’s a case of placing chords alongside one another in such a way as to find the ideal balance of unfamiliarity and reassurance, building intensity in anticipation of a gratifying, sonorous resolution. So what happens as Heti’s composition unfurls, with control over the arrangement of her ideas relinquished to chance?

In the first instance, I see it as an experiment in vulnerability and truth. A memoirist’s grasp on authenticity cannot ever be extricated from the performance of translating their experiences into words on a page. Even in the notes we furtively hold onto for ourselves, even in our tacit thoughts, we’re storytelling, narrativising our own perspective.

The randomness of Heti’s structuring principle figures as an attempt to take herself by surprise; an endeavour to shake off the artifice and polish of conscientiously choosing how she presents her once private thoughts. In a disavowal of manicured restraint, relentless anaphora exposes her fixations with reckless emphasis:

Feeling your personality infusing and soaking into everything you do – this contributes to a lack of charm in life. Feelings aren’t a choice. Feelings aren’t the most important thing.

Any perceived connections between one sentence and the next may merely be a matter of our projection, given they could in fact relate to events that occurred years apart. While reading, we’re weaving narrative threads from what we make of the absences. As such, Heti has invented a new form of confessional writing, deftly fusing intimacy and evasion. It’s as if we are encountering her journals through the lens of a shifting, elusive hall of mirrors. What does it reveal of us when we connect certain dots and ignore others?

In an incisive line from another boundary-defying work, Some Answers Without Questions, Lavinia Greenlaw explains how she “puts things in [her] notebooks to let them decay – to break down and reveal themselves”. In Heti’s diaries, such decomposition and discovery abound, as alphabetising reanimates and invigorates old thoughts:

All I want are some more experiences with him. All I want is to read books for a year.

In their newfound proximity, unobscured by the veil of time, contradictions are brought into sharp focus. As repetitions cluster, I wonder if Heti is investigating whether these disparate sentences will piece together a mosaic of a unified self.

That said, I am more allured by the messiness and shamelessness of Heti’s writing than by what it may uncover about essential or consistent individuality. Teachers have long instilled a mistrust of so-called ‘inelegant’ writing, framing this as unrestrained, indelicate and overly repetitive. But here, Heti is once again ripping up the guidelines, extolling the chaos of thinking and living and being.

Reflecting on the function of Heti’s fearless anaphora, I am reminded of Laura Marling’s Semper Femina, in which Virgil’s warning that “woman is ever fickle and changeable” is reappropriated and reclaimed. By unabashedly divulging her preoccupations and accentuating them alphabetically, Heti is likewise to her own complicated, obsessive, variable self being true.

Yet, in another way, this is a book about memory and the way we think. A friend asked me recently whether I think in full sentences. She, unlike me, is quite adamant that she does. As well as exploring the consistencies and fluctuations of personhood, this question is a prominent concern in Heti’s Diaries, too.

In reorganising her sentences, Heti strives to capture and represent the experience of thinking, to give shape to the constellations between our ideas. Her alphabetical arrangement formalises the way our minds leap from one association to the next.

The text plays with connection, control and agency, how thoughts can feel involuntary, arbitrary and chaotic, and what the process of recollecting might resemble when depicted on a page. Heti evokes the structure of memory as far from neat and chronological, and instead something akin to boundless ripples and echoes.

Throughout, time is compressed and distorted. As tension and friction predominate over consonant harmony, the density of Heti’s assertions decelerates her readers’ pace. Sentences about those she encounters congregate like iron filings around a magnet, meaning years of interactions are condensed into abrupt paragraphs. The names of those she meets feature heavily on certain pages and then suddenly disappear, reflecting precarious signals, lines of communication dipping in and out.

QUITE BEAUTIFULLY NOT: Always Open Always Closed by Caitlin Merrett King

In reference to temporality, Heti has spoken about wanting her writing to resemble the immediacy and immensity of beholding an artwork; how the multitude of ideas a painting contains can seemingly be taken in by the viewer all at once. In this way, I found Alphabetical Diaries to be reminiscent of Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter – the fragments of an exploded shed suspended inexplicably in mid-air, creating impossible shadows and the illusion of a moment frozen in time.

Both artists are concerned with coalescence and cleaving, the shattering of a refuge and the coexistence of chaos and control. Both Parker and Heti obliterated entities to painstakingly reform and transform them; grappling with questions of chance and agency. In elevating commonplace things, they are toying with the membrane between life and art, wrestling with the latent violence of trying to hold things together.

I act like a woman. I adore him. I almost collapsed writing that story. I almost think it’s better than the book. I always feel like if I don’t look at my life closely enough, I’m abandoning some important task, but maybe that’s not true. I always felt that writing was sort of a waste of time and I shouldn’t do it, then I overcame that this year, but I still have that feeling about reading, which is what I must overcome this year.

In Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion asserts “I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.” In Alphabetical Diaries, Heti invites us to contemplate what might happen were such past selves able to interact, as many of the thoughts she has had as many of the people she has been are reconstructed and allowed to intermingle.

The project, in its rebellious disregard for a cogent narrative, feels akin to the ‘ugly painting contest’ from her earlier novel, How Should A Person Be?, in which artists compete to create the most hideous work possible. Not, in that Alphabetical Diaries is ugly, but rather, in that Heti did not set out to create something charming or conventionally appealing when she fed her words into a spreadsheet. Instead, she challenges the notion that art must possess either of these qualities.

Literature is the work of freely controllable elegance and invention, but real life is mayhem – full of constraints and limitations far outside of our control. Alphabetical Diaries illustrates this dichotomy whilst blurring the peripheries between the two. Like the ‘loser’ of the ugly painting competition in How Should A Person Be?, Heti is too brilliant an artist to create something ugly. Even the ugliness she intently pursues – the self-obsession, the frenzy, the banality – possesses an incidental beauty.

Alphabetical Diaries by Sheila Heti is available now from Fitzcarraldo Editions and good booksellers.

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