Sheila Heti and I met at the Gladstone, a beautiful old hotel in the West Queen West neighborhood of Toronto, on a cold, snowy January weekend. She was warm, friendly, and generous; on her way to the hotel, she offered to bring me coffee and a croissant, and when she spilled some coffee on her new white pants, she sent me a string of charmingly self-deprecating texts about her attempts to remedy the situation, so that by the time she arrived, I felt that we were friends. In my hotel room, we drank our coffees, and later cocktails, and joked about the handprints on a rose-colored panel in the room, which we’d both attempted to push open, believing it to be a door. At some point early in our discussion, she told me that she once stayed at the Gladstone for several weeks after one of her previous residences caught fire. It was also where she held her first book-launch party, twenty-four years ago.

Heti was born in Toronto in 1976 to Hungarian Jewish immigrant parents. Her mother was a pathologist and her father an electrical engineer; her younger brother is a stand-up comic. She has lived in the city for most of her life, though she briefly studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, before completing a bachelor’s degree in art history and philosophy at the University of Toronto. Now she shares an apartment, not far from the Gladstone, with her longtime boyfriend and dog. She is the author of eleven books, starting with a collection of contemporary fables called The Middle Stories, which features stories with titles like “The Moon Monologue” and “Mermaid in the Jar,” published when she was twenty-four. Though she has written nonfiction and children’s books, Heti is best known for her novels, which include How Should a Person Be?, Motherhood, Pure Colour, and, most recently, Alphabetical Diaries. Her accolades are many: How Should a Person Be? was named one of the “12 New Classics” of the 2000s by New York magazine; Motherhood was a New York Times “Critics’ Top Books of 2018” and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize; and Pure Colour won Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award. She is the former interviews editor of this magazine, for which she interviewed numerous writers and artists, including Joan Didion, Agnès Varda, Mary Gaitskill, and Sophie Calle. Her work has been translated into twenty-seven languages.

Many of Heti’s books are formed through conversation and collaboration. How Should a Person Be?, about a group of young artists in Toronto and narrated by a playwright named Sheila, incorporates dialogue culled from recordings of Heti’s conversations with her friends, most centrally the painter and filmmaker Margaux Williamson. Women in Clothes, a New York Times–bestselling anthology coedited with Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton, collects work from hundreds of women on the theme of what they wear. Motherhood, a novel in which the narrator sets out to understand whether she wants to have a child, stages a conversation between herself and either chance or fate, depending on one’s perspective, which speaks through the mechanism of a coin toss. Alphabetical Diaries, comprising sentences drawn from ten years of Heti’s diaries and presented alphabetically, with the original chronology abandoned, becomes a conversation with the self across time.

Heti’s writing often directly tackles big philosophical questions about topics like art, selfhood, desire, our relationships to others, grief, and how a person should live. It is playful, probing, tender, and, in the words of Alexandra Kleeman, adept at capturing “the subtle expansiveness of an individual life.” Her work is also formally innovative and boundary-crossing: How Should a Person Be?, first published in 2010, is now considered an early example of autofiction. In The New York Times, David Haglund wrote of the book: “Sheila Heti [knows] something about how many of us, right now, experience the world, and she has gotten that knowledge down on paper, in a form unlike any other novel I have read.” In 2018, The New York Times named her part of “The New Vanguard,” its list of writers “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the twenty-first century.” Her fearlessness and propensity to follow her own curiosity make her a perennially fascinating writer.

—Cara Blue Adams

I. “MY WORLD WAS VERY SMALL”

THE BELIEVER: Since we’re in Toronto, I wanted to start by asking you about the city. You were born here. You’ve lived here most of your life. How has your relationship to Toronto changed?

SHEILA HETI: I loved growing up here. I don’t think that when you’re a kid, you really fantasize about other places where you might be growing up. Your home is just the only possible place, or at least that’s how I felt. But then in my twenties, I had a lot of angst about staying, and then I stayed. And in my forties again it’s become this of course sort of place, like, where else would I live?

Now we have a place a couple hours north of the city, so we’re here half the time and in the country half the time. I’m much less involved in the various art scenes, but in my twenties it was such a huge part of my life to go to people’s events and have my own events, to be interested in the cultural life of the city and how to make it better. Ultimately, I’m very happy I stayed. I don’t think I could have written in the same way if I’d been in another place.

BLVR: Did you ever live anywhere else for an extended period of time, and if so, did that have an effect on your work?

SH: I’ve done residencies, so that’s a month here and a month there. And I was in Montreal in my early twenties for about a year for school. I lived in New York for three months with a boyfriend who had a summer job there, and recently I spent a semester in New Haven, teaching at Yale. I travel a lot as a writer, too, to do readings and so on, so I feel like I’m always traveling in some way.

I went to Montreal for a few months around the time that I started to write How Should a Person Be? I think it was good to be able to be away from my friends and focus and read the Bible and feel lonely and rethink how I wanted to write. But I’m not sure if it was the city that changed me or just going anywhere, you know? Just getting out of my world for a little while.

BLVR: There’s something helpful about leaving your life behind.

SH: You’re not playing the same part that you’re usually playing in your life, which can keep you thinking in the same way and then writing in the same way.

BLVR: You studied playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada in Montreal, left that program, worked at a magazine for several years, and then went to the University of Toronto to study art and philosophy. What were your student days like?

SH: Theater school was a ball. It was my first time away from Toronto. I was eighteen. I got engaged within two months of being there. I just went crazy, you know? I guess getting engaged can be the opposite of going crazy, but for me, it was going crazy. It was totally wild to do that. I started doing drugs. I smoked pot every day. I’d never done drugs before. It was this program with three other writers, one of whom I’m still quite good friends with, Claudia Dey, and we just had so much time, so much freedom. There were very few classes. The school focused on the actors, and the playwrights were an afterthought. I was writing this weird adaptation of Faust and talking nonstop about art to my boyfriend, who was in the directing program. It was so great. I had no landline, so I wasn’t in touch with my family much.

BLVR: You had no landline?

SH: Yeah, for the first few months. I remember writing letters to friends back home, and it just feels like a whole other period in history.

The University of Toronto was different again. I was very isolated. I came back to Toronto with my boyfriend, and we broke up after a couple years, and then I went to university. I didn’t have any friends at that point—he had kept our theater friends. But it was also really wonderful. I spent all my time in this big university library called Robarts, thinking about art and artists. I remember thinking a lot about Jackson Pollock for some reason, just the way he used his body, how the art was like a record, a signature, of his body’s movements in space. I was really, really into school. I learned so much and thought so much about writing, and now I guess I romanticize how alone I felt. That’s when I was writing The Middle Stories and trying to figure out what my voice sounded like on the page, or what kind of rhythm my sentences made. I don’t know if I have ever since worked quite as intensely as I did then.

BLVR: It’s such a special time in life, when you’re young and you don’t have responsibilities, and you can be alone.

SH: Yes. I wasn’t on the internet. I had no phone… I was really profoundly alone. Even if I were just as free from responsibilities now, I wouldn’t be able to be that alone.

BLVR: I think sometimes about what it means for our culture to have lost that, for that to have slipped into history.

SH: Yeah. I’m amazed at how quickly culture changes. Even if I went totally offline and threw out my phone, I couldn’t recapture that time, for I would still know that this whole world of conversation was going on without me, whereas back then I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything. My world was very small.

II. “I WAS WALKING THROUGH THE GATES OF HEAVEN”

BLVR: When you were in university and writing The Middle Stories, you made a rule for yourself that if you had the impulse to write, you had to write.

SH: That’s still the way I think about it: that there’s a particular feeling in you that tells you that you want to write, and if you don’t catch it, that thing that would have been written in that moment will never be written. It’s not like you can save it for tomorrow. That feeling, or that awareness, was kind of sacred to me—it felt like the most important thing to honor. That seemed like the point of life, to follow that feeling and get down whatever wanted to come out. It felt very fleeting.

BLVR: Does it still feel that way?

SH: I find now that it doesn’t come if I’m in the midst of other activities. It might come in the middle of the night, but rarely in such an insistent way. Now it feels like it comes more from working: if I start working, then after half an hour or an hour or fifteen minutes of work, I’ll be in that same space that I used to be able to catch only from the air.

BLVR: Has your process changed in other ways? Has it become more routinized?

SH: There’s no routine, but now I can work anytime, anywhere. There are no conditions that I need. I can sit down beside my boyfriend when he’s playing video games with his headphones on and just start working. It feels like there’s this river running underneath my whole life. It’s always there; I just have to step into it. It’s not quite as elusive.

It’s partly because now I always have so many projects on the go that there’s always something my brain can apply itself to. When I was younger, I didn’t have even one project. I didn’t know what was going to come out, or in what way, or what it meant, or what it was for. It was just pure writing, writing with no sense of publication or a grander form. No sense of: Is it a short story? Is it a novel? It was just writing. So now I have those structures in my head, like, OK, this is this novel I’m working on. This is the other book I’m working on. This is an essay. Having those containers somehow makes it easier to step in. It’s easier to step into a container than into the void. Although I still do sometimes step into the void.

BLVR: When you moved from writing short stories to writing your first novel, Ticknor, a postmodern novel set in Boston in the nineteenth century and narrated by the biographer of a famous historian, what was most challenging and what was most exciting?

SH: Well, after The Middle Stories came out, there was a lot of criticism of me and my writing in Canada. I don’t think it got reviewed in the States hardly at all. But here there was a lot of hostility toward me because I was so young, I guess, and sort of cute, and the stories were strange, and I’d had a bit of success already in the States, being published in ­McSweeney’s, and I think all that stuff together irritated people. I felt very pigeonholed, like, Here’s the quirky girl who writes fairy tale–like stories, which didn’t feel at all right or true. I thought I had been unfairly cast in some role.

So I wanted the next book to be the complete opposite, to show the people who had thought that I could only write like that, that I was able to do something completely different. And so Ticknor was not at all in my voice. I chose a man as the character, an older man, a Boston Brahmin, just the complete opposite of me in a way. And it was painstaking. It was hard. It wasn’t fun. Most of what I wrote could not be put in the book, because it didn’t feel like it was in his voice. I was proud that I could do it, that I could work for four or five years on something that was so unpleasant, and that I did manage to make something so different from The Middle Stories. And I guess in some ways it turned me into a writer, in the sense of following through on a project when it’s not a pleasure. With The Middle Stories, I didn’t have a vision. With this one, I had a really specific vision, and I fulfilled it. And then FSG bought it, which was the most incredible moment of my life. I remember getting the call at my secretarial job, and walking home, and just feeling like suddenly I wasn’t walking on the sidewalk, I was walking through the gates of heaven. It was so meaningful to me. Of course, then they rejected my next book, How Should a Person Be? But at the time I thought, This is it, you know? I’ve been acknowledged by the world in a way that felt so, so meaningful. It was very exciting. I thought I’d have no problems from then on.

III. A SUBTLE, SLOW SENSE OF GROWTH

BLVR: Your subsequent novels tend to be formally innovative. How do you think about plot?

SH: I don’t know if I know what plot is. I think you just have to get someone to the end of the book. There are many ways of doing that. It doesn’t have to be plot. It can be the switching of moods that a person becomes addicted to experiencing, or a train of thought they become curious about, or a tone they want to stay in. There are so many ways to keep somebody inside a book and to make them interested in what’s going on.

BLVR: What are other techniques you use to draw a reader through a book? I’d love to hear you talk more about how you accomplish that, because you do so in unconventional and interesting ways.

SH: Rhythm is something I think about a lot. Breaking things up—like with Motherhood, breaking up the rhythm of the coin tosses with monologues and scenes. And knowing where people are going to get tired; I’m very sensitive to boredom, my own boredom and the potential reader’s boredom, and I never want to overstay my welcome. That creates a certain momentum that can propel you through a book. A subtle accumulation of details, like in the case of The Middle Stories. Or in the case of Motherhood, a really subtle, slow sense of growth, as if maybe the narrator’s vision is getting gradually wider, deeper. It’s a problem with every book: How am I going to get a reader to the end if there’s not really a plot?

With Pure Colour, there was a kind of narrative, actually, I think. It follows the main character, Mira, as she grieves her father’s death, and at some point, Mira and her father are in a leaf. I was particularly concerned in the final third of the book with having Mira try to bring the things she discovered in the leaf into the real world. I wanted her to fail at that, the way one tends to fail when trying to convey a spiritual experience to someone else. That felt like a plot to me. How Should a Person Be? had a kind of narrative. And even with Motherhood, the narrative was: She’s posed herself a question: “Should I have a child?” How is she going to answer it? So maybe I haven’t discovered any radically new ways to draw a reader to the end.

I do try to rely on plot as little as possible. I think employing plot makes a lot of sense if you believe that life proceeds by plot—by cause and effect—but I think there’s so much more to the path of life than cause and effect. Or maybe it’s the case that stories with plot are so satisfying because life actually doesn’t have a plot, and it’s gratifying to be reassured otherwise. I just don’t think I can make the mechanics of plot work. You have to manipulate your characters and your reader, in a way, and I don’t like to do that. It doesn’t feel like it comes from the deepest place.

BLVR: I agree.

SH: Though I love when other writers do it! I was just reading Kazuo Ishiguro and E. M. Forster, for example, and obviously there are all the great nineteenth-century novelists—Tolstoy, Zola. I think it’s one of the most incredible things to be able to do in the whole world. If I could do it, I would; I just can’t. But those are the books that I really like reading, you know? It’s very strange that you end up writing books that aren’t necessarily the books you would most like to read. Why is that? Why can’t we write the books we most like to read? You have your limitations, and maybe you’re interested in reading the things you can’t write, because you can’t write them.

BLVR: I’m always struck by how often writers’ influences are not whom you would guess.

SH: Yeah, people always say, You should read so-and-so. What they do is so much like your books. But I don’t want to read anything like my books. I’m trying to get away from my books when I read.

IV. THE ONLY WAY TO FIND THE ANSWERS WAS TO GO INSIDE

BLVR: With Motherhood, you began with much more material than you needed, and whittled it down from there. It’s a process you often use: you generate a lot of material and then edit. Can you talk about what it’s like to see the structure once you have accrued a large mass of words? When what you’ve called “the engineering mind” steps forward and you can see what it is you want to make?

SH: There’s not really a moment. It’s more like a structure accumulates. Gradually, every passage has found its place and can’t be moved anywhere else. It’s like a puzzle: You’re constantly moving passages and paragraphs and sentences around, and then one will lock in somewhere. And then you keep doing that until everything’s locked in and there are no pieces that are waiting to be put in. All the pieces that are meant to be in the book are in the book and are locked in, and there’s nothing in the book that can be taken out without upsetting the whole. It finds its only form.

BLVR: In writing Motherhood, at what point did you decide to use the coin toss as a method for driving the conversation?

SH: I flipped coins and asked questions of the coins for over a year and a half before I thought I would write a book about motherhood. The coins were an interim process after How Should a Person Be?, where I wanted to be in dialogue but also wanted to be alone. At one point I thought it was going to be its own book, “Talking to Coins.” Then, in 2013, I started to think that I wanted to write a book about this question of whether or not to have children, and also time and motherhood and femaleness. So I started looking at all the writing that I’d done in the previous few years, and I was looking at my journals, and I saw, Oh, there’s all this writing about that question in there. I was thinking about this question of motherhood before I realized that it was a book I would want to write. Then, looking through the coin stuff, it was the same thing. So I pulled together sixty thousand words from “Talking to Coins,” and the relevant stuff from my journals, and I started a new folder. I think I’m always writing the book before I realize I’m writing it.

BLVR: Whoa, interesting. I would not have guessed that the coin tosses preceded the idea of the book.

SH: Every time I finish a book, I don’t know how to write again. So I think the “Talking to Coins” stuff was a way of teaching myself how to write again, or figuring out how to write alone again, because How Should a Person Be? was so much written in the world and among other people, and I just forgot how to write, how to be alone in a room and write.

BLVR: And from there, was it a process of writing a lot of new material before shaping the book?

SH: Yes. I originally thought Motherhood was going to be a book of interviews. It slipped into becoming what it became after I finally accepted that the answers to my questions would not come from outside myself, but only by going inside. I didn’t want to look inside myself, though. I felt very resistant to that idea. But that was the only way this book was going to work.

BLVR: Where did that resistance come from?

SH: It just felt so much more solipsistic than interviewing other people. And it felt like it was not an important question. I felt embarrassed. I felt ashamed. I felt like no one would care. I felt like I shouldn’t care. I remember when we were trying to sell the book in Canada, talking to this editor about the proposal, and she said, Instead of writing this book, thinking about whether or not to have a child, you should just have a child. So I felt like I wasn’t getting a lot of support from the world.

BLVR: And yet it’s one of the most profound questions a person can ask.

SH: I know, but it didn’t feel like that at the time. When I was writing the book, I could not find a single other book that dealt with this question. Not a single book in the history of literature! So I really felt like this was a topic below literature. Now that seems insane, but that’s in part why it was hard to write.

BLVR: When I read Motherhood, I had the same thought: Here is this profound question, this question of whether to call another person into existence and incur responsibility to them, to change your life and to create and shape their life. How has no one ever written about it?

SH: Women’s literature is really relatively recent.

BLVR: It’s true.

SH: It makes you realize how recent women’s literature is. And reliable birth control is even more recent, which helps make motherhood more of a choice.

BLVR: When you arrived at the ending of Motherhood, were you surprised?

SH: I wrote that last page earlier than I wrote some of the other parts. I always knew I wanted that passage to be the end. I do still sometimes wonder: Was Motherhood the right title for the book? Because I think it suggests that the book is something different than it is. I once went to a famous bookstore in New York to sign some books, and the owner welcomed me in, and she was a mother, and she said, Well, you know what it’s like to have a child, and I said, No. And she said, But you wrote a book called Motherhood. I didn’t want to embarrass her by saying, Actually, the book is about not having a child. So sometimes I feel sad that the book has that title. But it had to be the title, because the last line had to be the line it was, and the last line is something like “And I called this wrestling place Motherhood.”

BLVR: Well, I think it’s a perfect title.

SH: Really?

BLVR: Yeah. To me that’s the genius of the title: that it’s about the wrestling, as well as the various ways in which you might create something, including writing books.

SH: Thank you. That’s reassuring. I think in the long term, it is the right title. But maybe not in the short term. In the short term, it maybe doesn’t attract some of the people who would be interested in it. But in the long term, it had to be Motherhood. Even when it was going to be a collection of interviews, I was calling it Motherhood. Sometimes the working title becomes the title, and then the whole book shapes itself around the title.

BLVR: And it’s also about your relationship with your own mother. So it’s apt in that way, too.

SH: Yeah. It is the title, but sometimes I rue that it is the title. But I don’t know what else it could have been. I’m actually kind of glad that a book called Motherhood is about not having children. I’m glad I got to the title first, before anyone else.

V. AN UNFAITHFUL DIARIST

BLVR: Both Alphabetical Diaries and Motherhood emerged in part from your process of keeping a diary. What have you tried to capture when you’ve kept a diary? How faithful have you been as a diarist?

SH: I’ve not been faithful. I write in my diary—on my computer—when I feel like it, and that’s not often. I don’t really do it anymore, but it was a place I would go when I had a lot of thoughts I wanted to sort through. I think of it as like combing hair: you are trying to get a knot out, and you keep brushing and brushing until the knot is out. Writing in my diary felt like that—like brushing and brushing until the knot was out. I wasn’t often recording what happened, unless there was something really special that I wanted to remember. I had dinner with Lena Dunham in 2013 in New York. It was around the height of Girls, and after that dinner, I thought, I want to write down everything we said. But that was very rare. I wish I had had that impulse more. But I was right. That was the only time we had dinner, ever. And I’m glad I wrote that all down. I wish I had done more of that.

BLVR: Who were some diarists you read as you developed your practice?

SH: [Bertolt] Brecht’s was one of the first writers’ diaries I read. Joe Orton’s. I had this collection of excerpts of diaries from women writers, and I owned a large hardcover copy of Sophya Tolstoy’s diaries. And I read Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and Anaïs Nin’s, obviously. There are a lot of diaries I’ve read, I guess. I mean, you don’t read them from beginning to end. You dip in and out.

BLVR: What was the pleasure there for you?

SH: I think it was just wondering, What is the writer’s life like? At a time before I knew any writers or knew what my life might be, I wanted to see inside their lives. I wondered, What do they think about? I remember reading Susan Sontag’s diaries more recently, and they were very interesting. I think I don’t have a 100 percent interest in the diary form. I have like a 50 percent interest. It’s not like a novel, where I have a 100 percent interest. You’re half-interested because it’s just clues.

BLVR: Are there any passages you remember vividly? Any clues that you came across that stayed with you?

SH: No, more just a general sense of: Oh, they’re preoccupied with love, you know, in a way that most grown-ups do not continue to be so long into their lives. There are preoccupations with politics in certain ways, obviously, art-making and friendships and productivity and travel, money, you know—maybe these are the preoccupations of everybody. But most people don’t keep a diary unless they’re a writer, and generally you don’t get it published unless you’re a writer. Or perhaps a political figure.

BLVR: True, except for Kathryn Scanlan’s Aug 9–Fog.

SH: Oh, I don’t know about this project.

BLVR: She found a diary at an estate sale written by an elderly woman from the Midwest, and she spent years playing with it, cutting and rearranging. It’s really beautiful. It’s this very ordinary life but it’s condensed, and it has a kind of mundanity, but a kind of poetry as well.

SH: When did this come out?

BLVR: Maybe five years ago?

SH: I’ll look it up.

BLVR: You can read it in an afternoon. Reading it made me wish that would happen more.

SH: You can just look on the internet, I suppose! Although it sounds different when a diary is written just for the person who is writing it, versus when it’s written for the audience of the internet.

BLVR: To me, the writer’s diary is interesting because it feels like it’s written for both private reasons and for a public.

SH: Yes. Maybe that’s what gives it a kind of shimmer.

VI. “THE JOY OF BEING ALIVE”

BLVR: I’d love to talk more about Alphabetical Diaries. You began with about five hundred thousand words from your diary, written over a decade. You then alphabetized the ­material by sentence, and cut it to roughly a tenth of that. The resulting book conveys the texture and sweep of a life without the chronology: preoccupations, daily routines, professional concerns, love interests, friendships. I read the serialized excerpt in The New York Times when I was in Los Angeles and had a few months off to write and think. As I read, I was sitting outside in Silver Lake, looking over the city.

SH: Oh, beautiful.

BLVR: It was the perfect experience.

SH: You read it online?  

BLVR: Yes. I prefer to read on paper, but the serialized version came to me in the form of a digital newsletter, so I read it on my phone. I found it exhilarating, poetic, funny, and moving. This was a time when I was thinking about diaries myself a lot, and it was so interesting to see something sculpted from a diary that felt like it existed in the worlds of poetry and the novel and nonfiction and conceptual art all at once. I admired the way that it made use of daily life to engage much bigger concerns: love, time, selfhood, how a person does or doesn’t change. I wonder if you could talk about juxtaposition and how that began to lead you through the book. What were you looking for as you were cutting?

SH: Just some sense, really. The book makes sense now, but it doesn’t if you don’t cut. So many of the sentences don’t work out of context, for example, and for the book to work, every sentence must work out of its context. But many of them didn’t. Many of them had no beauty or tone or feeling. And if you don’t cut, it can get way too repetitive; you don’t want the same thought expressed six hundred times.

BLVR: That can be the crushing thing about re-reading a diary.

SH: Yeah, you think, I’m so limited. It’s really humbling. And playing with juxtaposition was just so fun. Like when you realize, Oh, if I cut these three sentences, then sentence one and sentence five come together and they have this frisson, this friction that makes them sparkle, and that makes sentence one and sentence five both have more meaning, which is delightful. It was hard—that book took ten years to figure out. I didn’t know how long it should be. I didn’t know if I should alphabetize each year separately, or put all ten years together. I didn’t know what to do about the names. I didn’t know if it should even be a book, you know?

BLVR: Was there a turning point in the project?

SH: There were a few. Originally every sentence was on its own line, but Lisa Naftolin, who is also a book designer, was playing around with it and she changed it, making the sentences follow each other, so that every chapter was a paragraph. That was a huge turning point. I realized, Oh my god, it’s a novel. And the subject of the book is time. That was huge. I showed it to my editor, Mitzi Angel, at a certain point—it was eighty thousand words—and after she read it, we had a phone call, and I could feel the way she experienced it in the way she was responding to it—that she had found it rich and full. She said it made her feel joy, like the joy of being alive. When I heard that, I understood how to edit it further, and it confirmed for me that it was a book, and that its subject matter was also the joy of being alive, just the amazingness of having so many feelings and so many thoughts and things always changing and always staying the same and how miraculous it is. I wouldn’t have thought that would be the way a person could feel after reading the diaries until she said it, and then I could finally see the book from a reader’s point of view.

BLVR: That feels true to me. There are some passages I keep returning to because they make me alive to that joy.

SH: And the up and down. You realize, Oh, right, that’s what life is. It’s these ups and downs and the never-standing-still-ness of life, and at the same time, this kind of core that you can never get far away from. There’s some self. One is indeed a self. Even if it’s not a glorious self, it’s still yours.

BLVR: How did writing Alphabetical Diaries make you think about selfhood and change?

SH: I think we have this idea that the point of life is to keep changing and growing and getting better and more moral and more efficient, and to do things more right and to dress more right and to have better relationships—and after finishing the book, I began to feel that all that was illusion, fantasy. You don’t need to do anything. There’s nowhere to go.

BLVR: You’re going to be inside there the whole time.

SH: Yeah, you’re stuck in yourself. It’s OK! There’s no getting better, there’s no getting worse. There’s just this self that you’re in, and then you’re not in it anymore. I just felt less angst about being me and about there being some fundamental problem.

BLVR: What a relief!

SH: Yeah, it was a kind of relief. You’re not so bad, you know?

BLVR: It’s such a strange fact of life that your life is the only one you’ll get to see from the inside.

SH: Yeah. You can’t see your life from the outside; you can’t see anyone else’s life from the inside. It’s such a confusing imbalance.

BLVR: But that’s what books can give you: this sense of someone else’s life from the inside.

SH: Completely. The book’s thoughts become your thoughts. It’s so relaxing to be able to read. It’s just the nicest feeling.

BLVR: Yeah, you lose yourself, in a way, while also being intensely yourself.

SH: There’s just this home feeling when you’re reading. It’s like Oh, I’m at home. I’m reading.