Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti was born on December 25, 1976, in Toronto, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants; her brother, David Heti, became a stand-up comedian. She worked as a child actor and, as a teenager, performed in shows directed by Hillar Liitoja of DNA Theatre. She spent a year studying playwriting at the National Theatre School of Canada, then left for the University of Toronto, where she read art history and philosophy. Her first book, The Middle Stories (2001), thirty short stories published by House of Anansi when she was twenty-four, was taken up in the United States by McSweeney's. In Toronto she created Trampoline Hall, a monthly lecture night at which speakers talk about subjects outside their own expertise, and she later became the interviews editor of The Believer. A novella, Ticknor (2005), reimagined the friendship of the historians George Ticknor and William Hickling Prescott. A play commissioned from her in 2001 stalled for years, and the struggle to write it became part of How Should a Person Be? (2010), a novel built from taped conversations with her friend the painter Margaux Williamson. Revised for its 2012 American edition and subtitled A Novel from Life, it was named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and by James Wood of The New Yorker, and it divided critics as sharply as it delighted its readers. With Leanne Shapton and Heidi Julavits she co-edited Women in Clothes (2014), assembled from the answers of 639 women, which spent months on the New York Times bestseller list. Motherhood (2018), a novel about deciding whether to have a child, was shortlisted for the Giller Prize, and Pure Colour (2022) won the Governor General's Literary Award for fiction. In 2024 she published Alphabetical Diaries, a decade of her own journals sorted sentence by sentence into alphabetical order. She lives in Toronto.

For about ten years Heti kept a diary, some five hundred thousand words of it. Wanting to know whether she had changed over that decade, she pasted the whole thing into an Excel spreadsheet and sorted every sentence alphabetically. She then spent years cutting the result to around sixty thousand words, and published it as Alphabetical Diaries.