Given Sheila Heti’s recent return to diaries—long thought of as the ur-texts for individual expression—it should be no surprise that the question of what constitutes the self (and especially the writing self) has long haunted her work. This is perhaps most obvious in the titling of her most well-known book, How Should a Person Be?, but the question is just as present in her now oft-overlooked debut novel, Ticknor.           

The titular Tick, in one of his more decisive moments, internally proclaims, “There has always been one way to go about finding out what sort of man you are, and that is to go straight to people and return to yourself.” This sentiment foreshadows one that later appears in How Should a Person Be? that, “character exists from the outside alone.” But the irony of this statement in Ticknor is sharpened by the fact that the majority of the novel takes place in biographer Ticknor’s head on his way to a party he dreads. He doesn’t go “straight to people,” but languishes in himself. The novel elongates his bitter, anxiety-ridden, water-logged trek to his childhood friend Prescott’s house rather than depicting the party proper. 

But despite his lonely wandering, Ticknor is never actually alone in his own head. In fact, it’s the persistent presence of others that frustrates him. The worst offender is the idealized Prescott, who becomes the subject of the most famous biography Ticknor will ever write. Prescott is the monumental figure to Ticknor’s shadow: where Ticknor “had no books when I was a boy,” Prescott had many; where Ticknor has learned to write letters “as good as some books” to garner critics’ support for his work, Prescott seems to effortlessly attract goodwill; where Ticknor spends seemingly an eternity stuck in his own head, Prescott’s rule of thumb is “occupation with things, not self.”

The imagined binary between the powerful Prescott and the overlooked Ticknor, though, is made to break down. Prescott only exists in our imagination because Ticknor, his biographer, made him so. And Ticknor’s sense of self is constructed largely through comparisons between himself and his sometimes loved, sometimes hated friend, like the narrator’s construction of herself in How Should. There, the narrator muses about how, “Responsibility looks so good on Misha, and irresponsibility looks so good on Margaux. How could I know which would look best on me?” Here, the narrator tries on qualities of her friends like trying on clothes, seeing them almost as rough drafts for the self. Ticknor, too, uses Prescott as a kind of rough draft that he keeps, continuously, revising in order to better understand himself.     

This blurred boundary between the self and the other is perhaps most stylistically obvious in the fluidity of Ticknor’s internal monologue: “Go now. You have only fifteen blocks and already you are stalling. But it is not the darkness of the night that bothers me. It’s that I hate the rain…Go home if you want. You said you would bring the pie.” The seamless switch from “I” to “you” underlines the conversational nature of Ticknor’s thinking. There can be no embodied “I” without the understanding of the outwardly perceived “you,” no Ticknor without Prescott, no self without the people, no matter how much Ticknor tries to excise them.

But if there is a figure that haunts Ticknor even more than Prescott, it’s the figure of the Great Writer (or, as the narrator calls it in How Should, the “great personality”). Ticknor’s most explicit picture of this ideal comes not from Ticknor himself, but from Prescott, who is equally as drawn to and haunted by this figure. As a blind man himself, Prescott argues that his

“exclu[sion] from the busy theater of human action…was beneficial to men of learning, citing Democritus who had, as was related by Cicero, gouged out his own eyes that he might philosophize better, and Malebranche, who would shutter his room in the day if he wanted to think, preventing a single ray of light from entering; that without the distraction of worldly objects, the mind invariably turns inward toward contemplation, and how this, as well as the productive lives of the blind, give sufficient evidence of the worth of the human mind and its capacity of drawing consolation from its own resources under so heavy a privation, so that it can not only exhibit resignation and cheerfulness, but energy to burst the fetters with which it is encumbered.”

The italics indicate Prescott’s own writing where the plain type is Ticknor’s paraphrasing of it. Like with the “I” and “you” of Ticknor’s internal monologue, this interweaving draws attention to the opinion’s co-constructed nature. Both men are obsessed with the Milton-like figure of the blind writer whose ability to cut himself off from the social world is what fosters his genius. Here, social forces are constraints that “encumber” the genius, and to achieve greatness one must harness the masculinized “energy” it takes “to burst the fetters.”

This Romantic figure of the artist—which was popularized in the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century when Ticknor is set—is familiar to all of us as well. I bet you could picture him, if I asked you to. The writer, shut up in his bookcase-lined office, a tortured genius whose worth is marked by his own individuality and his work’s originality. He’s a he, because he’s always a he, although Heti seems less bitter about that than one might think, noting in How Should that “one good thing about being a woman is we haven’t many examples yet of what a genius looks like.” Whether this figure of the Romantic writer is an imagined back formation (as some have argued), or simply outdated (as others claim), the values it espouses of absolute individual autonomy and the genius of originality are perhaps even more persistent in our literary culture now than they were in the early nineteenth century. 

*

In case we were at risk of thinking that these values only had power over a writer’s sense of self back then, Heti returns to the imagined ideal of the Great Writer in both How Should A Person Be? and, perhaps less predictably, in Motherhood. But where Ticknor is in the mind of a tortured author seeking self-mastery through isolation, Motherhood is a lonely longing for connection. 

The book opens with its narrator noticing how “I often beheld the world at a great distance, or I didn’t behold it at all.” On the one hand, this is the isolated author, achieved: to have an original, unencumbered view of the world from “a great distance.” Heti’s narrator achieves this distance, momentarily, in How Should after leaving her husband, when she stands on the shore and “looked about me. I was alone, and I was free.” But in Motherhood, beholding “the world at a great distance” embodies the book’s aching, often wistful tone of watching from afar, of seeing but never quite experiencing. The Heti-esque narrator in Motherhood comes to understand that such connection, such experiencing, doesn’t just have to come from being a mother. By the end of the novel, rather than being the woman watching from the shore, she is the woman bobbing in the water alongside another woman in “one of the most wonderful moments of my life.” 

The realization that such connection can come independently of motherhood, however, is also the realization that such connection comes through the process of writing instead. “It seems like the main thing about motherhood is letting another creature come through you, whose life is entirely its own,” the narrator muses. “A child is…a reality all its own…a distinct point of consciousness in the world.” Of course, we would be forgiven for thinking that she is speaking here not of a child, but of a book, perhaps even this book. To see how authorship is like motherhood is to see how writing is not a product of original, individual genius, but an act of mediation, the process of “another creature” speaking through you.

Heti illustrates “being spoken through” in the exchanges the narrator has with a greater force using the technique of flipping three coins. In the exchange that opens the novel, she asks for guidance on structuring the book: “Should I start at the beginning and move straight through to the end? no Should I do whatever I feel like, then stitch it all together later? no Should I start at the beginning, not knowing what will come next? yes Is this conversation the beginning? yes.” Like in Ticknor, the italics are the other voice that cannot be excised by solitude. And the casting of these exchanges as a “conversation” socializes the act of writing. 

How Should, too, is a book built from conversation. Referred to by Heti and others as “a crowd-sourced creation,” How Should is comprised of recorded (on an audio recording device but also again in writing) conversations between the narrator and her group of struggling-artist friends. The decision to record their answers to the question posed by the novel’s title was, as the narrator puts it, “so if I liked them, I could make them my answers, too.” This ventriloquism is complicated, though. Her friend accuses the action of “tak[ing] away my freedom.” And the Heti-esque narrator worries that this makes her self–her ideas, her personality, her work–nothing more than “a copy, a possession, canned.”  

But instead of Ticknor’s anxiety or How Should’s narrator’s self-flagellation, the writer in Motherhood meets the outside voice with a flexible acceptance. In one of the novel’s most definitive moments, Heti’s narrator makes this social element of writing explicit: “You are never lonely while writing,” she thinks. “It’s impossible to be—categorically impossible—because writing is a relationship.”

While Motherhood embraces writing as an act of social mediation, it still struggles with how to understand the place of the self within this process. When wondering if writing this will ever help her be a butterfly or if she will always stay a caterpillar, she realizes, “maybe you will always be [the] mush” inside the cocoon. This metaphor depicts the self as always both stagnant and growing, trapped and yet transforming. It is a metaphor of the self as process. But this process is as frustrating as it is enlightening in Motherhood. 

“I just read over a journal from a year ago,” Heti’s narrator rants, “and it could have been written today. NOTHING but NOTHING has changed! How maddening!”

*

This moment from Motherhood might very well be the epigraph for Alphabetical Diaries. My first encounter with the book was defined not only by the repetition I felt in the book’s various publication formats, but also by the repetition within the text itself. Yet Heti’s new book is one that rewards re-reading. New revelations rise to the surface, new interpretations are fed by its sentences’ juxtapositions. The book’s opening reps even seem to anticipate this cycle of frustration, acceptance, and enlightenment:

“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, it can have many things that coalesce into one thing, different strands of a story, the attempt to do several, many, more than one thing at a time, since a book is kept together by its binding…A book that does only one thing, one thing at a time.”

The repetition in these sentences, like most repetition, is not pure, but repetition with minor, yet essential, variation. If the first sentence can be read as a thesis statement for how Alphabetical Diaries is about the self’s unwillingness to change over time, the second sentence explodes that understanding, overriding notions of forward progress in favor of a semi-stagnant re-seeing. It also anticipates my own re-reading: my frustration with a repeated exercise covering the same ground, and yet my kaleidoscopic reward to returning to the text to see something new. Each sentence, as this passage’s ending suggests, is focused on one thing from one moment in time. But bound together out of temporal order, these sentences reflect the kaleidoscopic writing self, released from the false logic of progressive time and re-enmeshed in the everydayness of its existence. In other words, the book becomes the cocoon of mush from Motherhood. 

Throughout the book, repetition with slight variation leaves small openings for paradoxical revelation about the socially mediated self. “But love can endure,” she writes in one of her more optimistic moments. “But love is not enough,” she counters in the next. Sometimes, the alphabetization results in a series of interrogatives, and other times in a series of imperatives: “Be a pro, Lemons said. Be a woman. Be an individual, he suggested…Be comfortable and assured and confident in your work life. Be creative, is what Pavel thinks people are told...Be miserable about the world. Be optimistic, for you know how steady application always gets you somewhere.” Such repeated imperatives give an immediacy to the socially mediated nature of the self, always being told who and what and how to be. 

Both this “Be” series and the “But” series before it resonate with Ticknor and Motherhood: the tendency for what is happening in one’s own head to also, still, always be a conversation. While this is implied in the former example’s juxtaposition, it’s made more explicit by the italics (again) in the latter. Alphabetical Diaries (and likely all of Heti’s journals) may excise the “Dear Diary” format, but that implied conversation is still there. Even (especially) in diary writing—where we imagine writing to be the most private—the self cannot divorce itself from others. 

Often, this socially mediated understanding of the self is made even more explicit in the book’s content. “All this morning, as I was cleaning up and wearing my green skirt, my thoughts kept thrusting Lars into my mind,” she writes, narrativizing the way other people break through her consciousness in private moments. 

The flow of the book’s sentences literalizes this; after finishing “K,” a long series of sentences all beginning with “Lars” breaks into the text. Soon, we are stuck with Lars, who erupts into writing consciousness all at once and seems, for a time, inescapable. Elsewhere, the narrator thinks of the persistent presence of the social in her internal monologue in more abstract terms: “Always having to smile and reassure everybody. Always I don’t want to hurt the other person’s feelings, so I act as pleasant as possible, meanwhile I am exhausted and getting a headache.”

This final sentence foreshadows one of the most common repetitions in the book: the narrator’s exhaustion of being stuck in her own head. “How long I wanted to be rid of myself—but couldn’t be.” Or, elsewhere: “I am completely exhausted with myself and it is not yet eight in the morning.” Then, soon after: “I am growing sick of being in my head.” Despite—or, more accurately, because—the writing self in the diary cannot escape this constant conversation with others, she is exhausted. The cyclical nature of the self and others co-constructing each other, like she showed us in Ticknor and How Should, is never ending.

Yet this cycle is also what makes art. In How Should, the narrator describes the act of writing the book itself as the process of thinking about “everything I had, all the trash and the shit inside me. And I started throwing the trash and throwing the shit, and the castle began to emerge...I made what I could with what I had. And I finally became a real girl.” The castle here is both herself and the book, a person and a novel that are built by “the trash and the shit,” the “mush,” “the other person’s feelings,” all stopped up inside her. Writing, like the self, is an act of mediating the accumulation. 

The repetitions in these diary sentences aren’t, to me, evidence of “how few themes actually interest” Heti. Rather, they reflect the inescapability of our ties to the material and the social: “relationships, writing, money.” These three are forever intertwined, despite our Romantic fantasy of the autonomous individual who can sever himself from the world to produce original (rather than repetitive) work. In Alphabetical Diaries, we see writing as process, as a drain-swirl of the self and the social that is not afraid to immerse itself in the mush.

For Heti, the writing self is not one who futilely attempts to disconnect herself from others, but rather one who understands herself as inevitably—and sometimes even pleasurably—socially mediated. After all, as she rightfully asks in Motherhood, “What good can all the books of the world be, penned by the loneliest men who ever lived?”