'Helen Garner’s second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the bombshell that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.
'With devastating honesty, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another—how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both thrilling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'‘I would like to write about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other,’ wrote Helen Garner, foreshadowing How to End a Story, the final instalment of her published diaries, following Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020). While the first two volumes spanned eight years apiece, How to End a Story spans only three. Starting in 1995, shortly after the release of Garner’s The First Stone, it details the dissolution of her marriage to another writer, V. As Lisa Gorton notes, this volume differs from its precursors both in tone and focus: ‘This one is as compelling as a detective story. This one is edited with the sense of an ending.’ (Production summary)
'In November 2020, I am on my couch in Adelaide while Helen Garner, from an airy study in her home city of Melbourne, adjusts her camera. In the Adelaide Hills, from Matilda Bookshop, Molly Murn leans in and asks, "Can you hear me, Helen?"
'This is 2020. This is how we book launch.' (Introduction)
'Helen Garner’s diaries have always been some kind of overriding preoccupation for this writer who breaks down the barrier between fiction and nonfiction. Forty years ago her detractors declared of Monkey Grip, arguably the most game-changing novel in Australian history, that it was simply her diaries regurgitated and dressed up as art.' (Introduction)
'‘Unerring muse that makes the casual perfect’: Robert Lowell’s compliment to his friend Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind as I read Helen Garner. She is another artist who reveres the casual for its power to disrupt and illuminate. Nothing is ever really casual for her, but rather becomes part of a perfection that she resists at the same time. The ordinary in these diaries – the daily, the diurnal, the stumbled-upon, the breathing in and out – is turned into something else through the writer’s extraordinary craft.' (Introduction)
'Helen Garner’s diaries have always been some kind of overriding preoccupation for this writer who breaks down the barrier between fiction and nonfiction. Forty years ago her detractors declared of Monkey Grip, arguably the most game-changing novel in Australian history, that it was simply her diaries regurgitated and dressed up as art.' (Introduction)
'‘I would like to write about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other,’ wrote Helen Garner, foreshadowing How to End a Story, the final instalment of her published diaries, following Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020). While the first two volumes spanned eight years apiece, How to End a Story spans only three. Starting in 1995, shortly after the release of Garner’s The First Stone, it details the dissolution of her marriage to another writer, V. As Lisa Gorton notes, this volume differs from its precursors both in tone and focus: ‘This one is as compelling as a detective story. This one is edited with the sense of an ending.’ (Production summary)
'In November 2020, I am on my couch in Adelaide while Helen Garner, from an airy study in her home city of Melbourne, adjusts her camera. In the Adelaide Hills, from Matilda Bookshop, Molly Murn leans in and asks, "Can you hear me, Helen?"
'This is 2020. This is how we book launch.' (Introduction)