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The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How To End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner review – the greatest journals since Virginia Woolf's
When I began reading Helen Garner's How to End A Story: Collected Diaries, about to be published in Britain for the first time, I kept copying little pieces of them into the book that I keep on my desk. Here was something that was beautiful, and there was something that was wise: unable to let these jewels go, my pen scratched on and on. At a certain point, however, I had to give up. These journals run to more than 800 pages, every single one of which contains a passage of such distilled acuity and brilliance, it leaves you half drunk with exhilaration. At this rate, I thought, I'm going to end up writing out half the bloody book. How good it is in middle age to be surrounded by so many wonderful older Australian female writers: Michelle de Kretser, Charlotte Wood, Garner above all. From afar, they blow something into my life I seem to need. In the case of Garner's diaries, this may be an acknowledgment of how things truly are for women; her anger, white hot on the page even at many years' distance, makes me feel that my own is not, after all, misplaced. People say that diaries should only be published posthumously, that there's bad faith – and murderous intent on the part of the unconscious – in going ahead while you're alive. In this case, though, I have to disagree. Oh, the sheer unwavering bravery of it! Garner burned diaries dating from an earlier period than these; when an editor suggested that later notebooks might be published, she 'freaked'. But then she made a deal with herself, a pact I'm not going to call Faustian. Nonfiction is never immaculately honest. Writers, as Joan Didion said, are always selling someone out. Nevertheless, there was a way forward. She would edit, but not rewrite. If she was to leave untouched the scorching observations of other people – ex-husbands, ex-friends, her poor parents – she would also resist the temptation to spare herself. How to End a Story comprises three volumes of diaries, the last of which was published in Australia in 2021. In the first (1978-1987), Garner is basking – in as much as she's capable of basking – in the success of her first novel, Monkey Grip, and her second marriage, to a Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Portail, is ending. In the second (1987-1995), she embarks on an affair with the Australian novelist Murray Bail. In the third (1995-1998), her marriage to Bail also unravels. I should say that both these husbands, as well as her daughter and friends, are referred to only by letters that are not even their initials; thanks to this, any Australian literary gossip will be doubly lost on British readers. But her cast list is small and finely drawn: F and V and all the others quickly become characters in a novel. 'Ah, good!' you think. Here comes G. 'Oh, no!' you think. 'What's X up to now?' Two things are happening at once. First, this is a writer's notebook. It is practice, and it is an outlet for all the agonies and contortions that are born of blank paper. After a snappy session dancing to loud music (Garner loves to dance), she writes: 'Then I crash into appalling bouts of self-doubt … the fact that I still feel the need to expose, thinly disguised or barely metamorphosed, my own experience.' How hard it is to produce a raison d'être every day 'like a spider yanking thread out of its own guts'. How she trembles at her desk: 'I will never be a great writer. The best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people's gullets so that they remember them.' She craves praise and yet she hardly expects it. Her capacity to absorb criticism, even spite, is awesome, especially in the months after she publishes The First Stone, a book about a sexual harassment case that has people – I mean women, mostly – blanking her in the street. Second, this is an account of a cataclysmic relationship: the sexual equivalent of the comet that's supposed to be heading towards Earth right now. By her telling – it's hard to doubt her – Bail is one of those old school, grand, manly Australians, chippy and high-minded and unyielding. From the moment he appears, you have the sickly sense she'll destroy herself by loving him as she does; that she will fold herself up like origami until she's the size of a paper pellet to be hurled into the bin. I recognised a lot of this, and many women will: the carefulness, the cringing, the feeling you're no longer yourself. It's so brutal and terrifying that as I read, I hardly remembered that Garner is now safely divorced, happily living next door to her daughter in Melbourne and celebrated as one of Australia's finest writers. All I could think was: jump before it's too late! Thank God she did not, after all, choose between her marriage and her diary (at one point, Bail sheepishly suggests that she censor herself, and desist from writing about him). These are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf's. How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner is published by Wiedenfeld & Nicolson (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘My 10,000 Hours': The Diaries That Made Helen Garner a Writer
The Australian writer Helen Garner's fiction has long been prized by people whose taste I trust. Yet when I've picked up her novels, I've bounced off them, like a spacecraft that has botched re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. Every reader must have a writer or two like this, ones they sense they should like but do not. Garner's work has seemed, in my brief encounters with it, thin and in want of polish. Now comes 'How to End a Story,' a barbell-weight book that collects three volumes of her diaries from 1978 to 1998, beginning in her mid-30s. At more than 800 pages, this a lot of Garner (no relation). I almost put this one down, too, because it gets off to a tentative and makeshift start. Book critics, like people who work in publishing, are always looking for an excuse to stop reading. But after a while I began to sync with her voice. By a quarter of the way in, I was utterly in her hands. Mea maxima culpa. This is one for the introverts — the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status. Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest and economical; take it or leave it, in the Australian manner. She is, in her telling, the kind of person who gets mistaken for the staff at book festivals. People walk up to her out of the blue and ask, 'What's the matter?' (This is a special hatred of mine, too.) She fears for her table manners. Photographers say things to her like, 'Your profile, it is not the best.' If you have ever looked at a photograph of yourself and were floored by your own unsightliness, well, Garner is a laureate of this experience: Her sense of unworthiness extends to her own writing. 'I'm just a middle-level craftswoman,' she writes. And: 'Grief is not too strong a word for what one feels before one's own weakness and mediocrity.' She battles nuclear-grade levels of impostor syndrome. Writers have kept diaries for myriad reasons. Anaïs Nin wished to taste life twice. Patricia Highsmith longed to clarify 'items that might otherwise drift in my head.' Anne Frank wanted to go on living after her death. Sheila Heti felt that if she didn't look at her life closely she was abandoning an important task. These are Garner's instincts, too. But she also says, charmingly: 'Why do I write down this stuff? Partly for the pleasure of seeing the golden nib roll over the paper as it did when I was 10.' This writing served a more serious purpose. Garner told The Paris Review: 'The diaries are how I turned myself into a writer — there's my 10,000 hours.' The quotidian details of life shine in this book — her pot plants, shopping trips ('Kmart, fount of all goodness'), dinner parties, washing her knickers in a bucket, defleaing a dog, mending a skirt, going to the movies, keeping a copy of 'Paradise Lost' in the outdoor bathroom. Sometimes she lives in small urban apartments, and at others in a rural house where she sees koalas and kangaroos and eagles and kookaburras. Here is her report of one meal out: 'At the hippies' house for dinner, I find in my slice of quiche two foreign items: a dead match and a pubic hair. I hide them under a lettuce leaf and we go on talking.' Her lit talk is ardent and adept: 'Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you are taking it.' 'Emotion,' though, doesn't care 'whether anyone's looking or not.' She appraises the blast zone around certain bores. About a dinner with academics, she writes: 'Spare me from old men's calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience.' This book does not need an injection of drama, but one arrives. After two failed marriages, Garner enters a relationship with a thorny, and married, male writer whom she calls 'V.' (He is the novelist Murray Bail.) They eventually marry, and his needs crowd out her own. She begins to feel like an intruder in her own apartment. He's the one who gets to write there, while she must go elsewhere to work. He's jealous of whatever success she has. Which is the host and which is the parasite? He commences an affair with another woman, a painter, and he prevaricates and lies. Garner pretends, for months, not to notice. She hangs on longer than you would think possible. It becomes harrowing. Their relationship is the mortar in which she is nearly ground into paste. 'For the first time,' she writes, 'I begin to understand the women who stay with men who hit them.' Work is her salvation and her bridge to the world. My plan is to return to her other books, and to wade in, this time, further than my ankles.
