Category Archives: slow read

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 624, 1997, to page 693, the beginning of 1998.

It’s less than a month since my previous post about Helen Garner’s diaries. But I’m getting close to the end. This morning I’ve read the first three pages of 1998, the year the diaries end. If I post today, my two final posts will cover roughly the same number of pages.

Most of this third volume has been taken up with the marital difficulties arising in part from Garner’s husband V’s demands on her while he writes a novel. She has been effectively exiled from their shared home most days so he can focus on the work. No matter that she has seen him walking up the street with another woman (‘X the painter’) a number of times. No matter that she has found herself pretty much unable to write. He remains impervious. When they moved back to Sydney he said he would rent a flat as a workplace, but he admits he lied, and he’s glad he lied, because, ‘Look at the result.’

The result is the manuscript of a novel that has been the subject of a bidding war in Europe. (And, as we know, the novel Eucalyptus was to be a critical success.) Garner is full of praise for the novel, to V and in her diaries. She spends four days checking the proofs with him and (a moment that thrills my proofreader heart) she picks up a spelling error and when he gleefully faxes the British publisher to point out the error she bets in her diary that he doesn’t mention that it was his wife who spotted it. The episode was made even more delightful to me by the knowledge that I would have missed the error completely.

The book is coming to an end, and so is the marriage, though until this morning’s pages, both Garner and V seem to think they can make it work. They have talked about her buying a separate flat for herself, but that seems unlikely to work when immediately after that conversation he scoots off to do ‘husbandly’ handyman favours for X the painter.

Just after my last post (at this link), V said he hated Helen writing about him in her diary. After much discussion she decides (on page 627), ‘From now on I determine not to write about V except in passing.’ She resists the ‘pressure cooking feeling’ that comes with this restraint for about three pages. But it adds wonderfully to the reading experience. What, one wonders, does the real-life V think about this book? For that matter, how does the real life X the painter feel about it – it wouldn’t be hard to discover her real identity.

This morning’s reading begins benignly enough with an encounter with Clive James in which he gives Garner a tango lesson. There’s the usual bit of mild unpleasantness when she tells V about it. He asks if anyone else was dancing, and when she says no he turns away ‘with that smile’.

Then, in the last two pages of today’s reading, everything explodes. For many pages now, Helen has been suspicious of V’s relationship with X the painter. He has consistently protested that he is not being unfaithful, while she insists that if that were so he wouldn’t be so secretive about it. At the lunch where Helen dances with Clive James, a woman takes her aside and hints broadly that there might be some substance to her suspicions. Helen leaves a ‘very short, last-ditch letter’ for V, who is out of town, saying she missed the trust between them and would like to be able to establish it again. The next day, as she passes through his work room on some errand, she sees a folded sheet of paper on his desk. Thinking it is his reply to her letter, she unfolds it.

A blow from a baseball bat.

It’s a love letter to X.

She stumbles into the kitchen and goes berserk. My last page this morning is taken up with the spectacle of berserk Helen wreaking havoc. Bearing in mind that V’s novel is the most important thing in his life, and that the two of them have recently spent four days immersed in proofreading it, the culmination of her rage is truly horrific:

I grab the proof copy of his fucking novel and fling it down on his desk … I rip the cap off his Mont Blanc fountain pen and stab the proof copy with the nib, gripping the pen in my fist like a dagger. I stab and stab, I press and screw and grind. The nib gives way, bleeding ink, and twists into a little golden knot. I hurl it aside

She grabs a handful of his cigars and dump them in spilled beetroot soup in the kitchen sink, but before that:

I leave a note on a card: ‘Don’t you know that being lied to makes people crazy?’

I had to leave it there. I snuck a look at page 694 and see that at first he denies everything but by the end of the page he’s owning up.

Throughout most of this volume, Garner has described herself as unable to write anything apart from journalism. During that whole time she was writing her diary. I can’t be the first to observe that during what she saw as a fallow period she was in fact writing a masterpiece. An extremely uncomfortable read, sometimes vicious about other people, sometimes ruthlessly self-critical, occasionally blisteringly honest – as in her description of her berserk behaviour: one thing to have done it, but how extraordinary to make herself write in such specific detail about what she did.

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.

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.

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 354, mid 1988 to page 458, six pages into 1991.

Since my last nominally monthly report on my progress with Helen Garner’s diaries I’ve spent a couple of weeks away. The Garner book is completely unsuitable for aeroplane travel, so this report is running late and I have fewer pages to report on.

One of the joys of the diaries is the elliptical narrative that emerges. At this stage of my reading, it seems that the whole 770 pages tells the story of Garner’s relationship with her third husband, the novelist known in these pages as V. In the first entries she is still married to F, a marriage which ends acrimoniously, though by now she and F are friendly again, as he helps clean up a translation of Monkey Grip and attends performances by Helen’s daughter. Then V appears and is one of two men she is having a fling with. She chooses between them, realises she is in love with V and embarks on a serious relationship with him, guiltily because he is married. He leaves his wife and for a time they live together secretly in Sydney, where Helen pines for her Melbourne home and community. Now they have moved together to Melbourne, where she is much happier and he is feeling uprooted. In the last couple of days of my reading the possibility of marriage has been mentioned, not by Helen or V but by a friend – recorded without comment in the diary.

This compelling story is embedded in a host of sharp observations of the world, notes on the progress of her writing, the twists and turns of other relationships, world events, the writerly life.

In today’s reading the main narrative advance comes in an entry where V says he finds it very hard to work in Melbourne. An otherwise unidentified ‘novelist from New York’ comments that whereas ‘traditionally’ in marriage the woman goes to live on the man’s turf, V has left his own territory and come entirely on to Helen’s:

He has no family and no kids, he’s estranged from his wife of twenty-four years, he has sold his piece of property, and he’s here.

This is a sweet note that makes one realise that the many diary entries about quarrels in which V comes off as arrogant, patriarchal, dismissive of the woman’s point of view are far from being the whole picture. The move to Melbourne was his suggestion, in response to Helen’s discontent in Sydney.

And there’s so much else in today’s five pages:

Helen submits Cosmo Cosmolino to Y (probably Diana Gribble), her publisher, they have a laughter-filled editing session, then she labours at some painful rewriting, and is scared that with this book she ‘will come a cropper’. She sees a fine cut of The Last Days of Chez Nous, and enjoys it, then is cranky when she receives faxes (faxes!) ‘demanding further dialogue for post-synching’. She mentions writing a review of David Marr’s biography of Patrick White, and delights in her father’s comment, ‘I think the writer of that book will be … enchanted by what you said about it.’

There are events from the wide world: Rajiv Gandhi is assassinated. There are notes on her reading (The Diary of the Rev Francis Kilvert) and music listened to, reports on conversations (notably one about sex on international flights – ‘For once I was entirely innocent’), a death, a divorce, a bust-up with an important woman friend. A friend becomes a grandmother. Her friend J (evidently Tim Winton) is interviewed on TV.

I like to end these reports with one entry. Here’s my favourite from today (page 458):

Out walking as it was getting light, V and I passed a blackbird singing on a wire. A very beautiful song, melodic, generously paced, sweet. V laughed: ‘I build good nests. I find many worms.’

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.

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 194 to 353, mid 1986 to partway through 1988

Helen Garner’s diaries continue to give me joy, five pages first thing each day.

A lot has happened since my last post. The character known as V has appeared and Garner’s relationship with him has become a dominant narrative thread. Even if a kind blog-friend hadn’t sent me a key to some of the people in the diaries, I would have guessed that V is novelist Murray Bail, who was to become Garner’s third husband. At this stage they are besottedly in love and Helen is spending a lot of time travelling back and forth between her home on Melbourne and hotels and other temporary abodes in Sydney, where V lives.

Other things are happening. Books are published and reviewed (she mainly quotes the negative ones). She appears at literary festivals all over the world and converses with the famous. She writes a screenplay, probably for Last Days at Chez Nous. A benefactor gives her money to buy a small house in rural Victoria. She moves out of the home she has shared with her daughter. Other young people come and go in her life. She has a religious experience and someone she calls ‘my nun’ appears. It’s hard to believe that this is less than two years in a life.

In today’s reading, there are 24 entries, ranging in length from a single short sentence to half a page. She watches Passage to India on the television and goes to the Australian Opera production of La Forza del Destino. She and a woman writer friend have an alarming conversation with an unnamed male poet about child abuse. She records a dream or two. She writes about the stars in Primrose Gully (‘How small they were, how far away’) and the ‘astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter’. (I just went walking in sunlit rain yesterday in Sydney in early winter, and I was astonished too.) She quarrels with the friend she lives with, ‘perhaps for the first time’. She records snippets of conversation, some overheard, some of which she is a part.

Diaries are often places where people write their misgivings and doubts rather than their considered opinions. There’s a lot of that in the entries about V. If it was a movie the audience would be silently crying out, ‘Don’t do it, Helen! Get out while you can!’ In today’s reading alone, she receives a letter from him that makes her want to shake him and fantasise calling it all off. She visits an art gallery with him and finds it impossible to tell him why a particular painting means something to her, partly for fear that he’ll tease her and laugh at her. She imagines him reproaching her for her reading habits. And she agonises over what their affair means for his wife, though they don’t seem to be able to talk about that – as in this on page 253:

‘His father went to jail.’
‘What for?’
‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’
‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’
Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards his wife. But he didn’t seem to notice, and went on talking.

But every now and then, almost by accident, we get a glimpse of why she’s in the relationship:

In Neilsen Park the astonishing beauty of Sydney in early winter: tremendous towers of cloud coloured delicately in greys and pinks, boats sliding or toiling, clear cool air. How can that hard-looking mouth be so soft?

I believe Garner when she says she didn’t alter the text of these diaries except to protect people’s identities (though not all the identities are well protected). I expect that she left entries things out. I’m in awe of her moral fortitude in deciding over and over again what to leave in.

I am a man of settler heritage. I wrote this blog post on the astonishingly beautiful land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)
– pages 1 to 193.

Someone at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival said that we ought to stretch our attention spans by reading for twenty minutes at a time – or it may have been by reading twenty pages at one sitting. That’s probably good advice, but I’ve now been reading just five pages of Helen Garner’s diaries every morning for a little over a month, and I’m convinced this is the best way to read them.

I expected the experience to be similar to reading Seamus Heaney’s letters in the same way (first of several blog posts here). But a diary entry is a different beast from a letter, even one written to an intimate friend. Garner is not concerned to present an acceptable face or to spare people’s feelings. I expect she has done some sparing in the editing – by anonymising most people, and probably by cutting some entries – but this is not a public face on display.

The diaries were, however, meant to be well written, to wrangle her observations and reflections into precise words. Nearly two-thirds of the way in the first volume, Yellow Notebook, narrative threads have emerged. Her second marriage, to a man identified only as ‘F’, has come to an end after a long period of bitter rows, and she is coming to terms with her new unpartnered life. Her first novel, Monkey Grip, won a prize on the first page, in 1978. Now, in 1986, she seems to go to a lot of writers’ festivals where people are all too happy to give their opinions about The Children’s Bach (1984) and sometimes mistake her for a staff member. A film she wrote the script for goes to Cannes – she doesn’t name the film (it was Two Friends, directed by Gillian Armstrong) or say any more about it. There’s a thread to do with religion: she senses the approach of what she calls ‘The Mighty Force’, and the thread has peaked in a brief entry (on page 185): ‘ I dread having to become a Christian.’ Perhaps related to that is her deep friendship with ‘J’, transparently Tim Winton (they laugh at gossips who assume they’re sleeping together).

I won’t be surprised if some time in the next decade or so an annotated edition of the diaries appears with notes identifying people and places, and elaborating on contexts. Without that apparatus, it’s like reading the ghost of an autobiography – tantalising, but still oddy satisfying.

There are dreams, conversations, snippets from her reading and film-going, lovely moments with her daughter and sister, irritating moments with various men, deft little pen portraits both physical and psychological, and entries that amount to prose poems.

There’s is a recurring fascination with murder, especially child murder. Several gruesome news items make their way into the diary, and then in 1985 she attends her first trial. Here she is talking to the father of a murdered girl:

I asked him if I could come to the trial.
‘Why do you want to?’
‘First because I thought you might like people to be with you. And second because I’m curious.’
The real truth would be in reverse order. In fact the real truth is part 2. The first is cosmetic, though it is true also, in another way.

How could she have known that this interest would lead to her brilliant non-fiction books Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), both published well after the end date of these collected diaries.

In today’s reading there’s a long, gruesome account of a visit to the dentist, a number of notes on possible books and stories to write, comments on movies (Visconti’s Bellissima) and books (she reads surreptitiously from a novel about a sadomasochistic affair at Readings book shop), snippets from conversations, descriptions of nature, quotes from a reader and a critic. Here’s a sample just from these five pages:

A micro-fiction:

At the school concert a girl’s proud father says, ‘I love you!’ and squeezes her in his arms. She shrieks, ‘Ewww,YUCK!’ and fights to break free. He grips tighter with a demonic grin

A delicious name-drop (‘the law student’ is her lodger):

Raymond Carver called collect when I wasn’t home, and the law student, confused, caused him to hang up.

A neighbourly conversation:

Out near the rubbish bins I ask my neighbour if she knows anything about Melanie Klein. ‘I absolutely detest psychoanalysis,’ she snaps. I bet you do. Look at your life.

A gruesome moment observed:

Outside the post office the dog shat out a tapeworm. It trailed behind her and I had to put my foot on it to snap it off.

A tiny addition to the underlying narrative:

Spring comes. People fall in love – or they will, when the sunny breezes blow and exams are soon and cafe tables are put out on the pavements. Will I? I can’t imagine who with?

I’m so glad she decided to publish these diaries. I’m pretty sure I’m also glad I’m not ‘the neighbour’, ‘the law student’ or even the ‘proud father’.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time since Arthur Phillip raised his flag on the shores of Warrane. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.

Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978–1998 (Text Publishing 2025)

A generous friend gave me this whopping tome for my birthday this year.

Someone said, ‘It’s a book you dip into rather than read from start to finish.’ But I’m not much of a dipper, so I’ve decided to take it on as a slow read – five pages a day for six months or so. I loved doing that with Seamus Heaney’s letters. Why not with Helen Garner’s diaries?

The diaries were originally published in three volumes: Yellow Notebook (2019), One Day I’ll Remember This (2020), and How to End a Story (2021), covering the years 1978 to 1986, 1987 to 1995 and 1995 to 1988 respectively.

From what I’ve read elsewhere, I understand that Garner kept diaries for decades before the entries that begin Yellow Notebook, but she burned them all, and decided in 1978 to write readable diary, not necessarily for publication, but with attention to the crafting of sentences. Four decades after starting the first proper diary in a yellow notebook acquired for the purpose, she decided to publish, with minimal alterations, and none to spare her own feelings.

I’ve just read the first five pages. My initial response is to feel a little deprived that the entries aren’t dated, and people are identified only by a single initial. Any information about what relationship people have to Garner is to be deduced from the text – which is an odd bit of false reticence when of the two character mentioned so far one is clearly Garner’s daughter and the other seems to be a lover whose identity I imagine would be easy to discover. Similarly, there is no scaffolding to say where an entry was written: on the first pages Garner is feeling alone in a city, and only gradually does it merge that she’s in France, probably in Paris.

I’m probably just missing Christopher Reid’s helpful annotations in the Seamus Heaney book, and I’ll get used to this bare approach.

I hope to write a first monthly report towards the end of May.

I am a man of settler heritage who has been alive for almost a third of the time elapsed since Arthur Phillip claimed this continent for the British crown. I wrote this blog post on the land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation. I acknowledge their Elders past and present and welcome any First Nations readers.