Hulu has snagged rights to author Sheila Heti’s forthcoming book — one that’s written in alphabetical order.
The streamer has optioned The Alphabetical Diaries, in which Heti took a decade’s worth of diary entries and rearranged the sentences in alphabetical order, to develop as a series. After cutting “thousands of sentences” the exercise took on something more like a novel, she explained in the introduction to a series of New York Times columns that presented an abridged form of the work. The book is slated to be published in 2023 by FSG in the United States, Fitzcarraldo Editions in the U.K. and Knopf Canada.
Hunting Lane, the production company behind HBO’s I Know This Much Is True and feature films Holler, Captain Fantastic and Blue Valentine, is behind the project. The company’s Jamie Patricof and Katie McNeill are producing.
Heti is the author of 10 books, including the critically acclaimed novels How Should a Person Be? (2012) and Motherhood (2018), both of which made a number of critics’ lists for the best books of their respective years. Her latest novel, Pure Colour, was published in May. Other works include Women in Clothes, a collaboration with Leanne Sharpton, Heidi Julavits and 639 other women around the world, and children’s books We Need a Horse and A Garden of Creatures. She is repped by Gersh and attorney Will Jacobson.
