When I worked as a bookseller, my coworkers and I learned to shelve books according to a numbered system. When new books arrived, they were stickered with a label to determine their corresponding categories, the sections where the books would be shelved, where they would live. This system of organization made it easier to stock the store and for staff to find books customers were looking for, especially those with which we weren’t familiar. We could always look up a title in the store’s inventory system, WordStock, which had an alarming, bright blue interface and a pixelated font left over from the 80s.

Occasionally, when shelving, we’d notice a book was labeled with a section we didn’t feel best corresponded to the content. It wasn’t the booksellers’ job to label the books, but, being readers, we had opinions. One of us might feel, for example, that a book of essays was just as much a book of poems, or should at least be shelved in both places—something we did now and then, if there were multiple copies, for books like Anne Carson’s Plainwater: Essays & Poetry and Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. Sometimes, there were debates. Section numbers were changed. Was Claudia Rankine’s Don’t Let Me Be Lonely a collection of mini-essays, a long poem, or a memoir? Why was Joe Brainard’s I Remember in Biography & Autobiography but not in Poetry? Who labeled this book?! There are many authors whose work is not only this or that, and the list is expanding all the time.

I’m sure the labels automatically corresponded to the Library of Congress data within the book, or to a system linked to the buying process. Regardless of the system and its categorizations, or how we felt about them, it was a system grounded in reason. For if, on the one hand, a store is to be orderly and efficient, if patrons must easily navigate a library, then labels are necessary. In the context of retail, a book must also, at the end of the day, be sold as one thing or another. Otherwise, it would be hard to track sales and know what to stock (or what not to stock). If you are a reader, it is nice to go to the section labeled “Fiction” looking for a novel knowing you will find one. It is more difficult to quickly and effectively pitch a book to the world if it can’t be presented in some recognizable form.

On the other hand, I believe that each piece of writing should be what it needs to be, labels be damned. So long as the author is truthful about the content—in discussing how the work was made—can real life not be fictionalized in a work of art, as it is in Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, or Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything, or Little Women? Can fiction not contain nonfiction, provided the writer has thoughtfully considered the ethics of incorporating a particular story? If a writer says she has written a novel that contains something that is true, or that she considers a book of poems her memoir, or that there is no one way to describe her work—is that problematic?

Sheila Heti’s latest, Alphabetical Diaries, like much of her uncategorizable work, contains different elements of form. Published serially in an earlier version in The New York Times (and in an even earlier version in n+1), the work is a diary accounting the author’s days over a period of ten years. Organized alphabetically, the sentences of each section begin with the corresponding letter of the alphabet. “A book about how difficult it is to change, why we don’t want to, and what is going on in our brain,” begins section A, and thus, the book.

Like most diaries, it covers a range of subject matter. As with How Should a Person Be, Heti’s “novel from life,” Alphabetical Diaries wrestles with what it means to live a life with art close to the center, but relationships, sex, and anxiety, too, rise to the surface, again and again. For myself, one of the strongest threads running through Heti’s collective thoughts was how much this is a book about writing:

“Art is not essential, but love is essential, and maybe that is why 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.”

This sentence beats at the heart of Alphabetical Diaries. For, unlike most diaries, this one abandons its natural form—the diaristic flow of days—and in doing so moves toward art. In the Times, Heti explains that she put lines from her journals into an Excel document before rearranging and editing them. The Times had asked Heti for a fictional work they could serialize. Heti chose Alphabetical Diaries, because, she writes, “The self’s report on itself is surely a great fiction.”

As with How Should a Person Be and Ticknor, Heti’s first novel, Alphabetical Diaries contains neither wholly fiction nor nonfiction, and Heti is conscious of the way her work straddles the two. This is especially apparent with regard to literary ambition: “Fiction and nonfiction together, because the imagination is more amazing than anything in life, and life is more amazing than anything you can make up.” I love this statement for its sense of affirmation, its championing of both imagination and reality.

In the B section, Heti writes, “Books that fall in between the cracks of all aspects of the human endeavour.” On reading this line, I thought that the author had perhaps written the kind of book she was describing: one that slips, in its singularity, into the cracks. But I caught on that word, “between.” What sorts of things fall between cracks? I envisioned cracks between couch cushions and car seats. I am not sure about “between,” but I can think of many things that fall into them: crumbs and lists and Scrunchies and phones. Popsicle sticks. Plastic bottle caps with codes on their undersides.

With Alphabetical Diaries, Heti has collaged together the things that make up a life. There are no paragraphs within the sections; the way each line holds equal weight regardless of the content reflects the randomness of days. The result feels choppy and surprising in the best way. Maybe “all aspects of the human endeavor” is a kind of metaphorical landscape, and Heti wants her books to reside in the spaces between the cracks in that land. Whatever her thinking, I loved the way the prose flits from one big idea to the next, the way it feels hungry and vulnerable and alive.

The UK edition (published by Fitzcarraldo) compares Alphabetical Diaries to I Remember, an autobiography that, like Heti’s, uses repetition as an engine. I first read I Remember in a college poetry class. I can still recall the thrilling effect it had on me, the way it juxtaposed seemingly arbitrary lines and details against one another (each line beginning with “I remember”), allowing them to simply be, until there was suddenly the wide and turreted landscape of a life.

“I remember the only time I ever saw my mother cry. I was eating apricot pie.”

“I remember artist smocks. Liver-shaped palettes. And big black bows.”

“I remember how much rock and roll music can hurt. It can be so free and sexy when you are not.”

As I recall, at the bookstore, I Remember was kept in Biography, but I wanted it to be in Poetry. It belongs in both.

Alphabetical Diaries has a similar effect. Heti, like Brainard, is “pointing” to things, bringing them to the surface, arranging them in interesting ways, with humor that adds texture and lightness to the prose. “I wish my head didn’t feel so full of junk,” says a line in the I section. Her arrangement makes for an effortless read, and part of this book’s beauty is that, as a collage, it contains something for everyone.

A line from the D section reads like a reminder to the author: “Don’t forget that although you aren’t telling a story, you must still do what stories do, which is lead the reader through an experience.” Perhaps this is what Alphabetical Diaries is most of all: an experience that cracks open a self, one thought, one project, one lover at a time. From self-doubt to self-assurance, the Strand to the Tate, A to Z, Alphabetical Diaries is an ode to the lived experience, and a jagged, psychological self-portrait. Like Motherhood, which grapples with the question of its titular subject, it contains a narrator full of feeling, a person who is confused, a person moving from one state to the next as she attempts to navigate days.

At times, reading, I’d pause, certain we’d been in another city, with another lover, in another headspace altogether a moment before, only to confirm that we were. I would wonder when we were going to circle back before realizing that where we were was past. To enjoy the experience, I had to shake off expectations of linear narrative, and—as with Heti’s latest novel, Pure Colour, in which the narrator gets trapped in a leaf—learn to be as elastic as the book. The bouncing, musical effect of Alphabetical Diaries mirrors the bouncing, musical effect of life, how it moves up and down like notes on a sheet, gets loud, then soft, then loud again.

“I will never know what matters the way that other brains know what matters,” says a line that pierced my heart a little, immediately followed by, “I will return to my book, but not with the little duster that one takes in hand when approaching ancient Egyptian tablets, but with a chainsaw and no fear.”

It takes courage, when making something, to apply a chainsaw to one’s work, to have no fear, to both question and to believe in oneself. Heti continues to apply courage in these endeavors, channeling it, like lightning, into books that fall “in between the cracks.” Books that, though they are stickered with a label, live as something else. I am glad such books exist. May they always be difficult to find.