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. Perhaps this would help me identify patterns and repetitions. How many times had I written, “I hate him,” for example? With the sentences untethered from narrative, I started to see the self in a new way: as something quite solid, anchored by shockingly few characteristic preoccupations. As I returned to the project over the years, it grew into something more novelistic. I blurred the characters and cut thousands of sentences, to introduce some rhythm and beauty. When The Times asked me for a work of fiction that could be serialized, I thought of these diaries: The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction, and what is a more fundamental mode of serialization than the alphabet? After some editing, here is the result.
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Actually, he doesn’t love you. Actually, he doesn’t want you. Actually, he is looking around the world for another girl, and because of who he is, he will find her and be with her. Added in about 4,000 words, bringing it to 56,000. After all, one does have to get back to work. After he left, I lay in bed, hung over, and the sun was shining into my room for the day. After that, I got in a cab and came home. After that, we all walked by the river. Alice Munro’s first book appeared when she was 37. All I am ambitious for is to publish this piece. All I ever wanted was to be an adult. All I ever wanted when I was younger was to be a writer, to be able to sit in one place and write things forever, and not feel like I had to do anything else. All I want are some more experiences with him. All I want is breakfast with my friends, and to return home to the rest of this bright and beautiful, sunny day. All I want is to read books for a year. All my work is so pleasurable these days. All of a sudden he didn’t seem very smart to me, and his belligerence wasn’t very interesting, or his interest in gossip, or his vanity about being in New York and coming into contact with certain people, or his insistence on seeing me in a certain light. All of a sudden I feel happy. All of my 20s were so strange, all of life is so strange. All of them move forward in time and art without me. All of this is just the part of me which is my sexuality, which is why I have always wanted to escape it; why I have always wanted to be celibate. All of this must be doing something to me, to be devoted to a man even in times of hardship and sore feelings. All of this seems like the culmination of some searching in my life — but that’s just the way I look at life, full of beginnings and endings. All of those projects seem dead; even the new novel I began seems dead; everything does. All the elements of the world, everything I encounter and that other people encounter, can be put in a book. All the fairy tales tell you that a person gets three wishes. All the faith you had in art, you can have in this man. All the people I hang out with make me doubt, for various reasons and in various ways, my ability to keep a relationship going. All the piles of dirt on the floor, waiting for me to collect them and put them away. All the really great things that have been created in art have been created by adults. All the time wondering what he’s doing that makes it so he cannot call or write. All you want to do is go home, curl up and die. Alone in a room. Alone. Alone.
Already I feel a spring of happiness inside me. Although what if living honestly doesn’t get you where you want to go? Always this tremble of insecurity or fear. Always the other is a source of strife in psychoanalysis. Always to be identifying the disease within ourselves. Am I going to finish cleaning the bedroom and the kitchen? Am I looking for someone to love? Am I making the wrong decisions? Am I to spend the next day, two months, six months, longing for Lark, hanging on his indifferent and careless emails, that he writes and sends and does not worry over? Am I wasting my time? Am I? Am low on money. Am making noodles. Am reading “Emma” now. Am tired and will go to sleep soon. Am tired today and feel like I may be getting a cold. And I didn’t want to tell him about my day. And I didn’t. And I do have a feeling that he wants to destroy strong women, as he once said. Anyway back to the story. Anyway I’m not crying about Lark, though several days ago I was. Are we cowards if we choose the lesser honor? Are you going to war, or are you drawing in an audience? Art changes the opinion of the masses, as much as science does. Art in other cultures, in cultures that were more concerned about the well-being of the group, had art that was not so concerned with inner psychology and one’s isolated problems, but rather problems that affected the tribe. Art is man’s nature. Art is not essential, but love is essential, and that’s why many people make art, to express their love of something — that tree, humans, the world, language, intensity of thought — and the person who doesn’t respond to a work of art is perhaps missing the love of the thing which the artist is pointing to, lovingly. Art, I saw yesterday, is not a benign or pleasant, do-gooder thing to be doing, I don’t know how I had not seen this before. As I lay in bed, it occurred to me how different I am from the person I imagine myself to be. As I write this, I know that this is just a moment of high confidence which certainly will pass. As if I could go down to the lobby and have sex with anyone I found there. As well, I was talking about the sadness of being oneself. Aside from that, life is really good right now. At last, I tried saying to myself, “You are in Paris, you are in Paris, you are in Paris, you are in Paris,” but the more I said it, the less convinced I became. At last, the ambassador’s wife came over, and she was like a second-rate first lady, and she had a very earnest way about her, and she spoke to the young man who was standing beside me about how good it was for him to have chosen the foreign service, and he replied that after Sept. 11, it was the only thing he wanted to do, and she said that she was looking for some young genius to help her — and he perked up — and she said, “to help me fix my computer.” At the beginning, people were mostly talking with the people they came to the party with. At the end of the conversation, Lemons said, “Well anyway, I just wanted to tell you about my dilemma,” but it wasn’t a dilemma at all.
Back at his place, he showed me pictures of his ex-girlfriend, and I talked to him about Lark. Back at home, I could lie in my bed, alone in my room, apart from everyone. Bad metaphor, humans as machines. Because I couldn’t leave, I tried to find the dinner party interesting, but I was unable to find anything interesting about Lemons’s new girlfriend. Because I had sex with Lark. Because I have zero dollars. Because I will probably ruin my life. Because I would get bored. Because I would leave. Because it is a pattern, and the pattern is: be with me, desire Alice, be with Alice, desire me. Because one is always falling in high heels, falling forwards. Because the standards here are so low, my standards have also become low. Because there is no God to ask forgiveness from if we trespass religious laws, we have to ask forgiveness from each other for trespassing or failing to honor human laws.
Cancel with Pavel and do nothing for the rest of the week but work. Canceled New Year’s Eve with Rosa. Canceled plans with Lemons. Causing pain to others is part of being in this human body. Count your money and see how you’re doing. Crushes on men. Crying about Lark. Curiosity is not a good reason to get married.
Sheila Heti is the author of 10 books, including the novels “Motherhood,” “How Should a Person Be?” and the forthcoming “Pure Colour.” This is part 1 of a 10-part series. Subscribe here.
Photographs by Yael Malka.
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