Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 459, 1991, to page 623, 1997.
I’m loving spending a little time each morning – five pages worth – with grumpy, self-questioning, acutely observing, word-loving Helen Garner. I’m now well into the third volume, and it’s reading more and more like a novel, with a clear narrative line.
This is the story of a marriage break-up. I imagine that even readers who come to the book with no prior knowledge would read it that way. As a reader, you know where it’s heading, but these are diary entries, so you know that the woman writing them has no idea of the shape of the story. Of course, the woman who edited the diaries for publication did know, and some sculpting of the narrative must surely happened in the selection process.
Since my last post, The First Stone has been published, and has created a storm, most of it in the form of attacks from feminists. This doesn’t take up a lot of space, but it’s interesting to read that Garner undertook to write a response to every letter she received. How glad she must be that the book was published before the age of social media.
True Stories, a collection of essays, is published. She agonises over whether to include ‘Why Does the Women Get All the Pain?’, the Digger article about the time she decided to answer school students’ questions about sex with complete frankness. (I’ve just checked my copy. It’s in there.) She worries that V, her husband, doesn’t know about that period of her life, and she has serious misgivings about the ethics. She needn’t have worried about V’s reaction – she notices that the bookmark in his copy of the book doesn’t progress very far at all.
But the main game is the marriage. The diaries record excruciating rows. V is working on a novel. (V is Murray Bail. The novel is Eucalyptus, which was published to great critical acclaim in 1998, probably after the period covered by these diaries.) He needs the flat to himself when he’s working, so Helen has to be elsewhere. It’s hard on her to be shut out of her own home, and he repeatedly dismisses her complaints. And then a couple of times when she can’t be in the house because he is working, she sees him in the street with another woman, a sculptor known as X. When she confronts him about this, he says she’s being unreasonable. Meanwhile she has started going to therapy, and the therapist – known only as ‘she’ – leads her to see her desire to escape the marriage as part of a long-term habit of running from difficulty. So she is determined to stick it out, make it work. Oh dear!
In today’s reading, I’m about a third into 1997. There’s some respite from the marital difficulties, just a couple of moments in five pages: he goes out to dinner with X, and there’s just a frisson of mutual awkwardness. Later she has a brief conversation with X in which X says she hates ‘people who tell lies’. Garner makes no comment, but that remark has an almost radioactive quality on the page. And there’s this:
V says that women’s writing ‘lacks an overarching philosophy’. I don’t even know what this means. Also, I don’t care.
She spends time on the phone with her francophone second husband, translating an interview with Thomas Bernhard. V eagerly takes it around to X, who ‘thought it was terrific’, though she has a small suggestion that makes Helen bristle..
Helen is still enjoying the novelty of working on a computer: she writes her first movie review for the Australian Review of Books, and it takes her less than three hours, typed ‘straight on to the computer’!
A US aircraft carrier comes to Sydney:
The streets of the Cross swarm with sailors. Some of the white ones are raw-looking boys, guzzling Coke, carrying bags full of boomerangs; others, especially the Black ones, are young and slender, their skin smooth and gleaming under the brilliant white of the gob caps. They stand about in twos and threes, murmuring to each other: ‘Yo. Yo. Hey, man. Wassup? Wass happnin’?’
And later she sees a sweet note from one of the sailors in the prayer-request book at her church.
She visits the Korean baths in Kings Cross, now long closed down. After going to Church at Easter, she takes the image of the angel rolling the stone from the open grave to her therapy session, and weeps for the first time in her therapist’s presence. Then she and her friend R compare notes about therapy: they decide R has a fear of bottomless grief and H is scared that if she let herself get really angry she’d ‘wreck the room or something’.
And after a short entry about a possible story about a hysterectomy, the last entry I read today is a nice example of the way the tone in this book shifts wildly from one line to the next:
Saw the Beavis and Butthead movie last night. It’s not as good as the TV show but I loved its utter grossness and moronic stupidity.
She doesn’t say if she went with V. I hope so. I hope he enjoyed it too. I think both hopes are in vain.
I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Darug Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.
Me fail? I fly! 