When the octogenarian author Helen Garner published her 1977 debut, Monkey Grip, about a single mother in love with a drug addict, some critics dismissed the novel for “only” lifting from her diaries. Readers, however, lapped it up, and Garner continued to alchemise her life stuff in acclaimed novels such as The Children’s Bach (1984) and The Spare Room (2008), as well as in short stories, screenplays and nonfiction.
Any fears that the untapped material remaining in her diaries might be merely husks are quickly allayed in How to End a Story. Comprising three volumes previously published in Australia, the collected diaries cover 1978 to 1998 – a period in which Garner came to literary fame, married and divorced twice, and raised her daughter. While Garner has journaled most of her life, she burned her early diaries in a bonfire – having deemed them too embarrassing or jejune. But “it seemed that in 1978 I had sat up and taken a proper look around,” she has written of the project.
Written as a series of fragments, the published entries were chosen for their “muscle” and only lightly edited. Not dissimilar to Garner’s fiction, in which the reader arrives at a scene in media res without any introduction to the players, we get no explanation of the wider cast of characters. Identities are obscured by an initial, often different from the first initial of the first name (Murray Bail, for example, is referred to as V). Arranged in chapters by year, we get no further date or location stamps.
The diary entries hop between (often grim) news clips, titbits of gossip, dreams, family life and observations on writers and writing. To my mind, it’s the latter that are the most compelling – revealing Garner’s literary influences and insecurities. “Each morning I set out for my office weak with fear,” she shares while working on The Children’s Bach. “I will never be a great writer. The best I can do is write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people’s gullets so that they remember them.” It’s also thrilling to read one of Australia’s greatest living writers’ reactions to another: attending a reading by Gerald Murnane, Garner is “overwhelmed with respect” for “the inwardness of what he writes”.
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The first volume of the diaries, Yellow Notebook, begins just after the publication of Monkey Grip, during a stint with her daughter in Paris, where she meets the man who will become her second husband, Jean-Jacques Portail. Back in Melbourne and having divorced him, she begins an affair with the married novelist Murray Bail. We also begin to see Garner’s interest in true crime, the subject of most of her nonfiction books. Attending her first trial, for the murder of an acquaintance’s stepdaughter, “fascination seized me,” she writes. “ ... The shock of detail”.
One Day I’ll Remember This, the second volume of diaries, covers a tumultuous period starting in 1987, tracking Garner’s affair with Bail, her daughter leaving home and a move from Melbourne to Sydney. It ends in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone, a book about a sexual harassment scandal at the University of Melbourne. Garner’s suggestion that the students bringing a groping case against their housemaster was “overkill” provoked backlash among feminists.
The final volume, also called How to End a Story, covers a three-year period in which Garner starts therapy and Bail embarks on an affair (or, how to end a love story). It’s a candid chronicle of the dissolution of their marriage. Garner’s father had warned that a relationship between two writers would never work, and the partnership is indeed haunted by creative rivalry. “The problem is that my success seems to get in his way,” Garner observes, veering towards nonfiction to avoid Bail’s domain.
She is admired for the intimacy of her novels, “I’m a writer who works off and is nourished by the events of daily life,” Garner writes of her process. A partial picture of her life forms by accretion of details rather than linearly – blink and you miss the news of her divorce from Portail, for example: “M’s father, F and me walking in the cemetery with the dog. Now I have two ex-husbands.” As elsewhere in her work, it’s the domestic details that sing. “In the gallery I liked humble paintings of interiors,” Garner writes. “A bedroom, a strip of light across a chest of drawers.”
Garner believes the diaries – an “eternal present” of all voice with no voiceover – to be her best writing. As a Garner stan, I delighted in the gold sifted through the quotidian and the reminder to sit up and pay attention. Less diehard fans, however, may prefer the more sculpted pieces in the forthcoming reissue of True Stories, Garner’s collected nonfiction, among the 10 of Garner’s books being reissued by W & N. And with a little luck, the diaries won’t be the end of the story after all, as she continues to capture what she calls “small, random stabs of extreme interestingness” on the page, “ ... arranging them like stepping stones into the dark”.
