{"id":169939,"date":"2025-03-03T10:00:12","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T15:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=169939"},"modified":"2025-03-03T15:38:20","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T20:38:20","slug":"on-helen-garners-diaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/03\/03\/on-helen-garners-diaries\/","title":{"rendered":"On Helen Garner\u2019s Diaries"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

From Claudia Keep’s portfolio, Interiors<\/em>,<\/a> in issue no. 246 of The<\/em> Paris Review.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl\u2019s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it\u2019s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open.<\/p>\n

What to do then, with the published diary? With its lock removed, its interior offered to the world not only as exposure but as form<\/em>: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers\u2019 diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes\u2014and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner\u2019s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey<\/em> Grip<\/em>, The Children\u2019s Bach<\/em>) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone<\/em>, This House of Grief<\/em>), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. \u201cLike being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,\u201d as the writer Helen Elliott put it. They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation (\u201cThe writers\u2019 festival. It\u2019s like being barbecued\u201d) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (\u201ctear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth\u201d), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: \u201cSentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you\u2019re taking it. Emotion doesn\u2019t give a shit whether anyone\u2019s looking or not.\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you\u2019re still living as \u201ctrying to make a bed while you\u2019re still in it,\u201d but as I read Garner\u2019s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the un<\/em>made beds, with messy sheets and sprawled out bodies stretching and spooning, the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.<\/p>\n

Far from reading like B-roll footage, these diaries feel magnificent and sui generis, beholden to no rhythms or logic but their own, simultaneously seductive and staggering, a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy. They offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner\u2019s life over two decades\u2014 two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter\u2019s coming-of-age\u2014but they always live in the weeds, built of the grain and texture of her days. No small part of their brilliance stems from their faith that there is no meaningful separation between these realms of inquiry: that reckoning with human purpose and the anguished possibilities of human love always happens within, and not above, the realm of \u201ctrivial\u201d daily experience. Which is to say: in their form as well as their content, they reveal where meaning dwells in our lives (everywhere), and how we might excavate it. \u201cIn my heart,\u201d Garner has said, \u201cI always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n

Between entries, Garner pivots deftly and unapologetically from interior to exterior, gravity to banality, existential rumination to lively anecdote: love affairs and therapy sessions, but also hot wind, big moons, salt air, a sunset cloud \u201cridged as neat and fine as salmon flesh\u201d and \u201cthe rodent flowing of squirrels\u201d across grass; the sting of a terrible review, the satisfactions of friendship, the beautifully naked bodies of aging women at bathhouses. In these pages, we find all the facets of living beautifully juxtaposed, as they are in life: gossip, sex, parenting, plate smashing rage, trips to the dentist. \u201cCrazy about the way Proust uses physical objects to keep his huge, billowing sentences grounded,\u201d she writes, and her prose does the same. We are returned to the concrete stuff of life: the single pubic hair she finds in the quiche at a dinner party, and politely tucks away; the half-dead tree carved up for a bonfire; the copy of Paradise Lost<\/em> stashed in her outdoor toilet; a friend describing his wife\u2019s homemade bread: \u201cthe sort of bread you want to peel open and lie down in.\u201d Even her description of a Thai meal on her fifty-fifth birthday is a minor revelation, and an ode to the pleasures of surprise (Garner loves surprise as a daily, creative, and even ethical force): \u201cjust as you think you know the taste, a note of some other herb or spice breaks through, as clear as a beam of light through a cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n

When people talk about personal narrative as a literary form, there is almost always a bias toward the insights made available by hindsight. But what can you see as you are coming down the road? \u201cStory is a chunk of life with a bend in it,\u201d Garner has said<\/a>, inviting us to consider the possibility that there\u2019s not necessarily a direct correlation between time passed and insight gained, as if you will necessarily \u201cknow\u201d the most about your own life at precisely the moment just before you die. You know things as you move through experience, and sometimes the fervent immediacy of this sort of knowing actually diminishes across time. Once you know how things play out, you cannot absolutely re-create all you felt inside of them: that sensation is gone for good. Garner\u2019s diaries are full of this intimate entwining of knowing and feeling, like two lovers tangled up in the sheets of an unmade bed.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Garner\u2019s first volume of collected diaries, Yellow Notebook, <\/em>spans the years 1978 to 1987 and was first published in 2019. It begins when her daughter, M, is just nine years old, still living at home. Garner\u2019s first novel, Monkey Grip<\/em>, has just won a major prize, but Garner is wrestling with whether her writing is too \u201csmall\u201d in its scope. \u201cEveryone\u2019s talking about Apocalypse Now<\/em>,\u201d she laments. \u201cMy work seems piddling, narrow, domestic.\u201d This first volume tracks the disintegration of her volatile relationship with F, her second husband, and the beginning of her affair with a married writer she calls V (the novelist Murray Bail) who will eventually become her third. \u201cOne day I\u2019ll have to burn this book,\u201d she writes. \u201cI use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife\u2019s preparations for Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

The second volume, One Day I\u2019ll Remember This <\/em>(1987\u20131995), tracks Garner\u2019s deepening affair with V, as well as Garner navigating M\u2019s leaving home: \u201cThis state is like a second labour. I\u2019m struggling to let her be born,\u201d she writes. A friend tells her, \u201cA brand-new abyss. I envy you. Don\u2019t fill it up with old things.\u201d Eventually V leaves his marriage to be with Garner, and she leaves her life in Melbourne to live with him in Sydney. At their wedding, her father predicts trouble: \u201cThey\u2019re both writers, though,\u201d he says, predicting one of the major subplots of the pages still to come. Things are already bumpy in these early years, but V and Garner are allies through the bumpiness: \u201cWhen we see couples who are cheerfully loving we exchange sad, wry glances.\u201d Resilience shows up like a glimmering, essential thread through all three volumes: Garner coming back to art, and to herself as an artist, through the frustrations of the writing process, the daily trials of love and grief, and the slings and arrows of critical reception\u2014at one point Garner girds herself to \u201caccept that I have enemies, and be robust about it.\u201d<\/p>\n

The title of Garner\u2019s third volume, How to End a Story <\/em>(1995\u20131998), refers not only to its place as the final movement of a triptych but to its account of the prolonged and messy dissolution of Garner\u2019s third marriage. By this point, the diaries have come to assume the velocity and integrity of a novel. Two of the major forces pressurizing the end of their marriage are V\u2019s relationship with X, a painter, and Garner\u2019s relationship with her analyst, who points out that she often lies on the couch in a fetal position, sometimes clutching her scarf \u201clike a comforter, or a bottle.\u201d V worries that analysis will threaten her artistic life, that it promises to too neatly solve or defuse the \u201cfamily unravelling\u201d that fuels her work. But he need not have feared: there is plenty more unraveling ahead. (And eventually, delightfully, Garner manages to claim her therapy expenses as \u201cprofessional development\u201d on her taxes, her triumph at this accomplishment so fervent it gets italicized, \u201cthey allowed it<\/em>!\u201d)<\/p>\n

We meet X at her fortieth birthday party: \u201cShe uses her body expressively, in ways that are un-Australian\u2014turns of the head, graceful arm and hand gestures.\u201d Earlier in the diaries, Garner has wondered if the world is made of triangles rather than couples, and X will eventually become the third point in the triangle of Garner\u2019s marriage as X and V develop a consuming friendship that Garner suspects has become an affair: \u201cIf you\u2019re a man\u2019s second wife you know for a fact that he\u2019s capable of anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the great hardships of V\u2019s intimacy with the painter X is not just the sting of romantic betrayal but the fact that jealousy obstructs Garner\u2019s relationship with her own powers of observation: \u201cI didn\u2019t know any more how to be happy or to enjoy, for example, the glorious beauty of the ocean and the summer sky.\u201d But her jealousy eventually becomes an artifact to be investigated, an object on which Garner can train her furious insight, and an enemy to be subdued by \u201cturning away to something more interesting.\u201d In their constant pivots, the diaries often offer a version of this relief from claustrophobia, turning from domestic conflict to the world outside\u2014the city, friends, work, daughter\u2014like opening a window in a dim, stale room and letting in fresh breeze, oxygen, sunlight or moonlight, or the smell of rain.<\/p>\n

As ever, Garner is attuned to both the existential depths of romantic conflict and the banal surfaces of how these conflicts play out. \u201cSince we were writers, each of us had a horror of being engulfed by the other,\u201d she writes, \u201cand had to fight against it.\u201d But so often these deep conflicts express themselves through the materials of petty grievances: \u201cContest between me and V about what each of us has done to keep the soap from going mucky in the bathroom.\u201d There\u2019s catharsis in the moment when Garner finally discovers the draft of a love letter to X, confirming all her suspicions of an affair. She documents the wild scene with vigorous specificity: smashing V\u2019s espresso machine on the floor, grabbing his expensive cigars from the humidor and jamming them into the beetroot soup she made for him, stabbing a draft of his novel with his Mont Blanc fountain pen until the nib is smashed and bent. (Later, she feels solidarity with a schoolgirl who has cut the laces of her brother\u2019s expensive new running shoes. \u201cI long to say, \u2018Sweetheart. I have cut up a straw hat with scissors and drowned cigars in soup. We are sisters.\u2019 \u201d)<\/p>\n

Garner takes her heartbreak with her to Buenos Aires (\u201cI trudge up and down the avenidas lugging my smashed and bleeding heart\u201d) and then to Antarctica for a travel piece (\u201cI wish I could have a clean heart. Mine\u2019s like an ashtray. Full of Cohiba butts and spit”). She finds the air so clean and cold it\u2019s like a numbing agent\u2014\u201cinside of my head is an ice landscape, an element of brutal clarity, like the first snort of cocaine\u201d\u2014and a sense of wonder and gratitude in pushing her face into the \u201ctight, springy moss-pads\u201d left in the wake of an ancient glacier: \u201cThe concrete inside me started to soften and give way.\u201d<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The K\u00fcnstlerroman<\/em>, a bildungsroman that focuses on the development of an artist, is a genre traditionally associated with youth and coming of age, but anyone who has ever tried to make art knows the process of becoming an artist never ends. In Garner\u2019s diaries, we find, among other things, a stunning K\u00fcnstlerroman<\/em> of middle age. Here is an artist expanding and evolving across the middle of her life, in thrilling and unexpected ways. Over and over again, we witness Garner reaching through various kinds of grief and frustration (divorce, artist\u2019s block, maternal guilt) to keep falling in love with daily life, her family, her city, strangers on the streets and in the baths, finding in her art a well of power that cannot ever be taken from her. \u201cNothing can touch me,\u201d she writes, in the midst of consuming marital conflict. \u201cThe power of work<\/em>. Art, and the huge, quiet power it gives.\u201d<\/p>\n

We also watch the emergence of Garner as a journalist, starting to investigate extreme manifestations of human darkness and tragedy. After an interview with an arsonist, she writes, \u201cI begin to think of violence, death, burning, what people do to each other, to their children. And to think that I need to find out about these things.\u201d In toggling back and forth so dynamically between her own interiority and other peoples\u2019 lives, these diaries give lie to the assumption that being interested in yourself necessarily means you are less interested in other people. Garner\u2019s diaries\u2014indeed, the arc and range of her entire career\u2014suggests another truth entirely: that deep introspection and outward curiosity are often symbiotic.<\/p>\n

Garner writes with vivacity and precision about the process of writing itself, a subject that often drives writers into the clutches of self-referential tedium. (She is also wonderful on her own dreams, another thematic Bermuda Triangle, describing a dead body stuffed full of pens, or a woman nursing a large red bell pepper: \u201cA slit opened in the capsicum\u2019s side and it began to suck voraciously.\u201d) She nails the frustration of unproductive writing sessions (\u201cnow that I\u2019m sitting up in bed, pen in hand, on a rainy Saturday afternoon, all my little stored-up treasures turn their backs and hide in the shrubbery\u201d) and confesses the sting of not being included in the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature<\/em>, but she gives us the good stuff, too, like the triumphant sensation of finding the right place in a novel for a detail that\u2019s been \u201cdogging\u201d her for a decade. If Horace coined the term ars poetica<\/em> to describe a poem that explains the art of poetry, then perhaps Garner has given us an ars diarium<\/em>\u2014insofar as these diaries skillfully, glintingly, make a case for their own mattering, a quicksilver manifesto sewn like a glimmering thread through these pages: \u201cMeaning is in<\/em> the smallest event,\u201d she reflects. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be put<\/em> there: only revealed.\u201d<\/p>\n

At one point near the end of their marriage, Garner writes, \u201cV says that women\u2019s writing \u2018lacks an overarching philosophy,\u2019\u201d and records her own brisk reply: \u201cI don\u2019t even know what this means. Also, I don\u2019t care.\u201d Tonally, this is pure Garner: colloquial and self-possessed, jaunty and winking, supple and wry\u2014but not huffy. And while it\u2019s true that there\u2019s nothing I would call an \u201coverarching philosophy\u201d spanning these diaries, they give us something far better, with a slyer and more inviting architecture: not overarching but subterranean, deftly emerging from the rough terrain of experience.<\/p>\n

What are the tenets of this subversive, subterranean philosophy? It has more to do with cleaning the dishes, or making breakfast for a grandson, or sitting down for tea with a friend than it does with the utterly silent lunches Garner recalls the composer Igor Stravinsky demanding from his family. At its core, this subterranean philosophy believes that the obligations and distractions of daily life are not distractions at all: they are the conduits through which we arrive at profundity; they are midwives of grace and insight. It believes that humility and surprise are the cornerstones of both rigorous self-knowledge and moral action. The more willing we are to be surprised by ourselves, other people, and experience, the more we are capable of honesty, discovery, care, and transformation. Garner feels a deep kinship with the nun who says, \u201cI love intellectuals who hesitate<\/em>.\u201d She is fascinated by a man who keeps but doesn\u2019t read his parents\u2019 letters to each other: \u201cPerhaps he doesn\u2019t want to lose the state of having a secret from himself; or to reach the end of the mystery, the bottom of the bag.\u201d One senses Garner doesn\u2019t really believe in the bottom of the bag; instead, she believes in the generative understanding that she can\u2019t ever fully understand herself. \u201cWhat is the point of this diary?\u201d she asks. \u201cThere is always something deeper, that I don\u2019t write, even when I think I\u2019m saying everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

These diaries are not only generous with the soaked sponge of daily life, they are also generous with the reader<\/em>, inviting and rewarding many different modes of reading. You can disappear into them for hours, like swimming deep into the ocean of another person\u2019s life. But you can also read them in tiny doses\u2014just a few entries at a time, in moments stolen from precisely the kinds of obligations and relationships the diaries document\u2014without feeling you are betraying them. Moving in and out of the diaries, tunneling into them for a few rapt moments, then being called out again feels like inhabiting their native ecosystem. I found myself reading the entirety of 1983, the year of my own birth, in stray moments on a weekday afternoon, waiting for the results of a strep test at an urgent care clinic, and then curled in a corner of the living room while my daughter played a game that involved laying out an imaginary banquet for fairies who were deciding what ages to remain for the rest of their lives. \u201cLudmilla will be forty-nine forever!\u201d she cried. These diaries do the incredible thing that great literature can: they create a mood and a field of resonance that reaches far beyond the act of reading them. They offer to return us to our own lives with more curiosity and keen attention.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

From the introduction to Helen Garner\u2019s<\/em> How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978\u20131998<\/a>, to be published by Pantheon this month. Read our Art of Fiction interview with Garner here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Leslie Jamison is <\/em>the author of books including <\/em>Splinters and <\/em>The Empathy Exams. She teaches at Columbia University.<\/p>\n

An earlier version of this essay misidentified the <\/em>Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature. It has been updated.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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