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.