How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998

Diaries #1-3

by Helen Garner

WINNER OF THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE • For the first time ever, collected here are all three volumes of the diaries of Helen Garner, inviting readers into the world behind the novels and nonfiction of a literary force.

“This is one for the introverts — the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status . . . . [Garner's] prose is clear, honest, and economical; take it or leave it.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master of many literary forms, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of "ordinary people in difficult times" (New York Times). But the inspiration for it all was her extensive collection of diaries—fastidiously kept, intricately written, and delightfully dishy, unspooling the inner lives of her insular world in bohemian Melbourne.

Now, for the first time, all three volumes of Garner's inimitable diaries are collected into one book. Spanning more than two decades, each finely etched volume reveals Garner like never a fledgling author publishing her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s; in the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s. And all the while, they bear witness to one of the world's great writers hard at work. 

Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger—but also of resilience, quotidian moments of joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction, Diary, Australia, Biography, Biography Memoir, Autobiography

833 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2025

About the author

Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She has published many works of fiction including Monkey Grip, Cosmo Cosmolino and The Children's Bach. Her fiction has won numerous awards. She is also one of Australia's most respected non-fiction writers, and received a Walkley Award for journalism in 1993.

Her most recent books are The First Stone, True Stories, My Hard Heart, The Feel of Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation. In 2006 she won the Melbourne Prize for Literature. She lives in Melbourne.

Praise for Helen Garner's work

'Helen Garner is an extraordinarily good writer. There is not a paragraph, let alone a page, where she does not compel your attention.'
Bulletin

'She is outstanding in the accuracy of her observations, the intensity of passion...her radar-sure humour.'
Washington Post

'Garner has always had a mimic's ear for dialogue and an eye for unconscious symbolism, the clothes and gestures with which we give ourselves away.'
Peter Craven, Australian

'Helen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia.'
Ed Campion, Bulletin

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Here’s an exercise for you: open a book of diaries (Alan Bennett, the Goncourts, your own) and mark just the best couple of sentences on each page. Now imagine reading a book composed of just those highlights – how it would leap from thought to thought, how you would apply yourself to drawing a narrative thread between them.

That’s how it feels to read Helen Garner’s Collected Diaries, which are made up of brief sections separated on the page, each consisting of a few sentences (frequently just one; occasionally they stretch to half a page or so), with the effect that we jump in and out of scenes and incidents with no interstitial fluff. There is no filler here. It is all killer. A life boiled down to a series of Pascalian pensées.

With most books, it’s the writing itself that you focus on. Here it’s the editing, which feels like a sustained act of intelligence and generosity. Without any immediate context, you have to read actively. You can’t help engaging. This is especially so because people’s names have been replaced by code-letters, some of which are obvious enough: her friend J., who wins his second Miles Franklin award in 1992, must be the mighty Tim Winton, and another ‘famous writer’ friend, Z., I’m pretty sure is David Malouf. Beyond that, most people remain unidentifiable to me, and you have to learn about them as you go.

Sometimes the entries are snapshots of a scene:

Went to lunch with a feminist academic. Odd to feel so at ease with someone who proudly declared that she had never read Chekhov, and advised me to ‘give Dostoyevsky a miss’.

Often they include beautiful observational sketches:

Liquid magpies, currawongs scooping and wolf-whistling.

And sometimes they contain fascinating reflections on her work:

I wrote several extremely long sentences, the labour of which afforded me the most exquisite pleasure and satisfaction.

Most of them, however, are in some way about relationships, chiefly those between men and women. In the early diaries, she is upbeat about gender relations (‘I like men. I just like them’), but a certain degree of cynicism, or at any rate disillusionment, comes to dominate, until she is talking instead about a ‘bombed-out minefield’ between the sexes, and clenching her teeth over

the hopelessness of men and women, the vast chasms between them—the death of sexual love, wandering attention, physical degeneration, men’s wide-ranging sexual fantasies and greed.

Uh-oh. Much of this change has to do with one relationship in particular – that with the character of V., who is clearly Garner’s third husband, the writer Murray Bail. When I read the first volume of these diaries back in 2019, I loved it but I saw it as a random spatter of events. It’s only now, seeing it in the context of the other two volumes, that I realise how carefully these entries have been chosen to frame the story of Garner’s relationship with Bail, whom she meets in volume one, moves in with in volume two, and ultimately separates from in volume three.

People who knew Bail back then describe him as kind and generous, and of course we’re only getting one side of the story here. But with all those caveats in mind, he really does come across as just an absolute cunt in these journals – expecting her to provide food and housework while remaining consistently snide about her own writing, and indeed of ‘bloody women’ in general and of ‘women artists’ in particular.

He presses her to move from her native Melbourne to his home ground of Sydney, but then makes it very clear that he can’t work properly if she’s in the house. So every morning she has to leave, take on a rented office space to get her own work done, and then come back to find him watching cricket on the sofa and waiting for her to make dinner. ‘He wants to be a reclusive artist and to be married,’ in the judgment of Tim Winton (if that’s indeed who ‘J.’ is). ‘You can’t have it both ways.’

In this period (the mid-90s), Bail was working on what would become his novel Eucalyptus, now regarded as his masterpiece. Seeing the creation of it from behind the scenes here reminds me of the old gag about what Einstein, Mozart and Picasso had in common. Answer: a wife to make sure they ate, slept and had clean laundry.

V. says that women’s writing ‘lacks an overarching philosophy’. I don’t even know what this means. Also, I don’t care.

Perhaps seeking to spike the competition, Bail encourages Garner to gravitate towards non-fiction, and she publishes a controversial study of sexual abuse allegations in college, The First Stone. Despite its hostile reception among feminist critics, it becomes a bit of a cause célèbre and sells well, which only upsets the balance at home even more.

He is as generous as he can possibly be about my book and its success, but if I had success like that with a novel there’d be serious trouble—I don’t know what trouble exactly, but life would get tougher. Why are men so fragile? If he were getting more attention than I was, everyone would be at ease, it would be seen as normal and appropriate. Tilt it, and everything gets unhappy and shadowy. Maybe it’s true then. A woman artist who wants to develop as far as she can needs to live alone.

To make matters worse, she gradually realises that V. is spending more and more time with ‘X. the painter’, a dainty European femme fatale who lives nearby. Bail left his first wife to be with Garner and, as she remarks grimly, ‘If you’re a man’s second wife you know for a fact that he’s capable of anything.’

What’s amazing is that the intermittent flashes in which she presents this unfolding drama, shorn though they are of all the usual narrative context, still generate a narrative that is as propulsive as any novel. At first you read with the almost voyeuristic pleasure of gossiping with a smart, thoughtful friend: He said what? She did what? But the details becoming increasingly gripping – it’s an absolute page-turner.

‘My work is very minor. It will never be noticed by the world at large,’ Garner writes at one point. ‘But this does not excuse me from the responsibilities of any artist.’ I was very taken with this commitment to her craft; and for a modern reader, it brings a certain satisfaction to reflect that much of Garner’s best work is still ahead of her when these diaries end, and also that she has now far eclipsed her ex-husband in the canon of Australian letters.

Also – she’s not minor. What she’s done with these diaries alone puts me in mind of Michaelangelo, removing all the marble that wasn’t David. This is on a different scale, but here, too, what’s left is pure art.

[Celine Nguyen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone I've spoken to in the last month has heard about how amazing this book is. I haven't read Garner's fiction yet—only her interview in the Paris Review, where she said:

I write my diary last thing before I go to sleep or first thing in the morning, sitting up in bed. I’ll write down an interesting dream, or what happened that day, or something that one of my grandkids said to me. I don’t think of the diaries as work. That’s why I like them. I like the way I write them, because it’s not anxious. I might be describing something I’m anxious about, but the actual writing process isn’t anxious, because there’s no one breathing down my neck. I don’t have to finish it by a particular time or show it to anyone or get anyone’s approval or permission. I’m trying to write as well as I can—­it’s not sloppy, I’m not just dashing it off—­but I’m free and not constrained by anything else. I found that when I was editing my diaries for publication, I didn’t need to revise or polish them that much. That made me see that the diaries are how I turned myself into a writer—there’s my ten thousand hours.

The sheer quantity of good writing in her diaries is almost unbelievable. They're full of psychological insights, amazing (funny/charming/sad/endearing) character portraits, amazing dialogue, some of the most poetic and lovely nature descriptions I've come across in prose…extremely visceral descriptions of music…I couldn't recommend this more. Here's just one, exceptionally beautiful passage:

A handyman’s here, putting up curtain rod brackets for me, when two young blokes from [the furniture store] stagger in, lugging the sofa wrapped in thick white plastic. They heave it across the spartan living room and dump it with its back to the big window. I’ve only ever seen it in dim artificial light. They strip off the first sheet of wrapping, and the second. Somebody gasps, somebody sighs. It’s a dusty, silvery, ethereal blue-grey, shading into pale lavender. The spring morning pours into the room, bathing it in purity, a light in which the sofa levitates, as insubstantial as a cloudbank. The three men and I stand in a line, breathing together, in wordless rapture.

[Abby · Rating 5 out of 5]

“At dinner the surgeon asked me why I write with a pen rather than using a dictaphone or a word processor. ‘Why would I?’ ‘Because it’s faster and more efficient.’ ‘But it’s my life’s work. I’m not in a hurry.’ I was surprised to hear myself make that answer.”

A writer’s diary, written to be read, and with beautiful insight and sharp wit and emotion. Helen Garner seems to possess that rare quality in an artist: the ability to see oneself very clearly. It is long and elegantly accomplished: a personal history of the writing life.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

"I need to find out why I so often get myself into situations where people have to symbolically murder me".

This was sublime. I bought it after it won the Baillie Gifford last year and decided to keep it for January, turn it into my morning meditation practice. There's something about diaries in January that just set the right tone, intention wise. Taking it all back to the basics: what it means to be human, how to observe all the small things that make a life monumental, how to prove to ourselves that we do, indeed, exist.

Garner is magnificent.

[Caitlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a special book

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm going to have trouble explaining why I liked this so much. But let me give it a try.
I've read Helen Garner's fiction before and I love her writing, so that's a big part of it. This is a long collection of her diaries for several years. Much of the time her personal life is a train wreck. She goes thru a couple of bad marriages and is BRUTALLY honest about the declines and falls. There was a strange voyeuristic pleasure at reading about her relationships, I'll admit. At times her work goes well, but she also has periods of despair. She starts therapy and writes about those sessions.
But what I really loved what just what she considers a "diary." Many, many entries are short - often just a sentence. She recounts her dreams, writes quotes from books she's reading, gives interesting reports on the news or the weather, tells us the subject of the sermon in Church - much of this written in unapologetic, beautiful sentence fragments. And just the way she uses language! She describes the word "cup" - "fat, short and stumpy, and optimistic." When she's depressed she describes herself as "a sack of different sadnesses being hauled around by a skeleton." (Just the fact that it's "different sadnesses" instead of "sadness"!)
I was surprised to find she's still alive, because I can't imagine anyone letting people read this while she is still on earth. In the diaries she even worries about them being read after her death. The honesty is stunning.
It took me awhile to read this - it is long - but I absolutely reveled in every page of it.

[Alice Lambert · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's an amazing experience to a read a writer's diary over a 20 year period – all 800 pages of it. Two decades of life are rendered over a series of snapshots including fleeting thoughts, snippets of dialogue, news reports, observations from the bus, music, clothes, friendship, deaths, marriages, and her unwavering love for her daughter.

It becomes a bit of a slog around 1995 as she faces a backlash for an unpleasant sounding book minimising campus sexual harassment. Then speeds up like a thriller towards the end, as you will her to leave her disastrous third marriage. I miss reading it.

[Jessy · Rating 5 out of 5]

stupendously good

[Demetri · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book opened with an ordinary sentence, and I felt the tug. Not dramatic, not showy. A record. A record of something that otherwise might have gone unrecorded. The rhythm of it, the plain surface, the way an entry doesn’t explain itself but waits for the reader to lean in and make the connection. I knew then what I was in for: not a narrative in the strict sense, not an argument, but a life broken into shards, and each shard glinting when the light shifted.

One of the earliest fragments: a dream. Thirty-five typewriters buried in a garden. I paused there. To dream of tools of writing hidden in the soil, like relics or corpses. To dream of words silenced, waiting for excavation. This dream sits beside a family crisis, a sister’s loss, an ordinary shopping trip. The juxtaposition is what compels me. There is no smoothing, no authorial hand guiding us toward “theme.” And yet the themes rise anyway: the tension between domestic clutter and intellectual urgency, between the writer’s compulsion and the silence imposed by fear or shame.

The book is a chronicle of selves colliding. The self with the partner, V, combative, withholding, sharp. The self with friends, colleagues, sisters. The self with critics and strangers who write letters, unkind or admiring. The self with the past—teaching days, controversies, the question of who one was, what one dared to say in public. Each self leaves its mark, a bruise, a flare of joy, a shadow of doubt.

Moments return again and again to the body. Colds, bruises, drunken collapses, burns, illnesses, the fragility of skin and lip and bone. I read these passages with a wince, but also with recognition. To chronicle a life is not just to chart ideas, but to write down the state of one’s body on a Tuesday afternoon in autumn, in Murray Bridge or New York or Vienna. The way the bruise looks in the mirror, the taste of antibiotics, the weight of a swollen lip. These notes are brutal and honest. They anchor the work, keeping it from drifting into abstraction.

There is always an eye for others. The Down-syndrome boy lifting his foot to the window, laughing with the author’s ladle game. The old woman in the supermarket line. The cab driver vomiting lining from his stomach, convinced it was cherries. These people live in single paragraphs, but they stay with me longer than characters in a well-plotted novel. A passing stranger in a train can say more about a life than pages of dialogue in fiction.

The tension with V. Always there. He resents, provokes, undermines, mocks, resists. And yet sometimes he cooks lamb, or massages, or buys chicken soup packets, and there is tenderness. The book refuses to tell me how to interpret him. It doesn’t resolve into villain or companion. He is present as an argument, a burden, a sharp stimulus. Their conversations spiral, stall, restart. He lectures, she defends, they collapse into silence. And I, as reader, sit in the silence too.

Across the years the book covers, the writer is always teaching herself how to write again. She wonders if she has anything left, despairs at her blank cupboard, questions whether she has the right to invent. She reads Borges, Proust, Tournier, Austen, Paglia, Janet Malcolm. She copies lines into the diary, not always commenting. These quotations shine like lanterns along the path. To read them inside her book is to feel the strange intimacy of a mind storing what it needs, like water.

Some of the most piercing moments are about family. The father’s cancer. The mother’s strange mixture of ignorance and subtle discrimination, the knife sharpened across the book cover. The sister’s grief after her husband dies in the surf—how the scene at the airport collapses into keening. The letter left on the pillow: pride, love, simple recognition. I felt these pages enter me slowly, like breath, like the delayed return of tears.

I was surprised by the comedy. It is easy to think of diaries as solemn records, but here, in the line about the Walkman and Lenny Kravitz, in the operatic trills with the boy outside the kitchen window, in the sly glance from the Italian grandmother on the train—laughter bursts out. It relieves, and it deepens. To laugh is to acknowledge life’s absurdity, its refusal to line up with what we want.

Reading across the book, I began to sense a structure, though it hides under disorder. The fragments accumulate, echo each other. A letter in 1993 about estrangement is answered in 1996 with a note of reconciliation. A complaint about lack of solitude resurfaces after three years, in another city, in another flat, but with the same weight. These repetitions show me what a life feels like: not progress in a straight line, but circling, revisiting, revising.

What to say of the style? At first glance, spare. Short entries, sometimes no more than a line. But the spareness is deceptive. Within each vignette is compression: a tone, a gesture, an entire relationship distilled into ten words. “I must slow down and remember him more.” That line could be the thesis of a marriage. The book teaches me to notice the pause, the silence after the dash, the breath that separates one observation from the next.

In New York: the puffy shirt Seinfeld episode. At MoMA: the Cézanne bather. At the 92nd Street Y: Shostakovich played with forearms of power. These are not travelogue entries. They are records of astonishment, sudden comprehension. They remind me that art enters life in bursts, not as continuous education but as shocks that rearrange how one sees.

I cannot avoid speaking of the therapy. The sessions recounted are uneasy, fumbling, suspicious. The desire to lie on the couch. The scarf turned into a comforter. The foetal positions, the silences, the dread before an appointment. Here is the real crux: the book becomes not just a record of what happened, but of the attempt to narrate the self to another. That attempt falters, twists, eludes. And yet, in the act of recording the faltering, something is revealed.

By the time I reached the final pages, I was overwhelmed not by climax, but by the sheer accumulation of living. Meals, quarrels, funerals, shelves, sewing, grapefruit juice, music, arguments about Hopper. Nothing grand, nothing conclusive. And yet the effect is grandeur. Life, as recorded, is grandeur.

What do I carry away? A sense of courage. The courage to record what is embarrassing, petty, unresolved. The courage to resist polishing the self into a consistent figure. The courage to admit to jealousy, to envy, to fury, to despair. The courage to keep writing even when the mind insists it has nothing to say.

I close the book and think of the fragments that will stay with me: the soup ladle lifted to the window, the sound of gulls folding wings only at the last second, the letter left on the pillow, the scarf soaking up tears, the laughter at a puffy shirt, the fear in the night that everywhere was nothing. Each of these fragments lives on as if it were my own memory now.

My reception of the book: 91 out of 100.

And I realise the rating does not measure flawlessness. It measures something else: the power to make a reader live beside another life, not in fiction, but in the raw debris of days. It measures the ability to write one’s way into honesty, with all its costs. It measures the rare pleasure of recognising yourself in someone else’s record, and being grateful they kept the diary open long enough for you to read it.

[Mat C · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best book I have read in a while. A collection of diaries wouldn't typically appeal to me, but I had read and enjoyed Garner's This House of Grief and saw that this had won some awards. I'm glad I gave it a chance because this is a special book.

When I think of diaries I think of someone going "I did this and then I did that." Helen Garner's diaries are not like that. Each chapter is a year in her life and the diary entries are short paragraphs noting an interesting event, passage, or dialogue. People in our lives constantly say weird, witty, and confusing things. We listen, note it, and then forget about it. Garner wrote it down. She's funny, unpretentious, willing to poke fun at herself, and insightful. I've read books that I loved so much I didn't want them to end, but this was the first time I remember finishing a book where I knew I'd miss the person who wrote it.

The last volume focuses on the disintegration of her marriage to the writer Murray Bail, who had the tough luck of being a manipulative jerk while also being married to a brilliant writer who kept a diary. That last volume isn't an easy read, but it's hard to put down. I can't think of any novel I've read that approaches this subject as interestingly and truthfully as she does here. There are lots of things that fiction can do that non-fiction can't, but the reverse is true too.

[Queezle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve never read Garner before but this was very interesting to read. Cringey and dated at parts, often I didn’t like Helen herself at all, and Murray Bail DOES NOT come off well. 5 stars because of the grip these diaries had on me! And interesting to see Australia 30 years ago

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book I’ve read all year. Captivating, propulsive, reflective and personal. Gorgeous language, turn of phrase and humour. Endlessly quotable and engrossing.

[Text Publishing]

The following book reviews have been shared by Text Publishing, publisher of How to End a Story: Collected Diaries.

‘Raw, incisive and, as she puts it, “bareknuckle”. I can’t wait to pore over them with a fellow reader.’
Dua Lipa

‘She is a genius...When I’m reading this Garner book [the diaries], I’m thinking this is one of the greatest experiences of my life.’
Zadie Smith

‘I have never encountered a writer who can harness and describe emotion quite like she does.’
Joumana Khatib, New York Times

‘I am reading Helen Garner’s diaries, and they’re amazing. I have them by my bed, and they’re huge thick volumes you can kind of dip in and out of. She is a very brilliant Australian novelist, and she’s published her diaries from the 1970s and 80s. They’re just little tiny vignettes and observations from her days. At one point, she says that she’s writing the best things and the worst things in her diary. She writes so beautifully. Her novels are beautiful, but her diaries are fascinating and very, very moving.’
Maggie O’Farrell

‘What a privilege to have this book.’[Best Australian Books of 2025]
Lucy Clark, Guardian

‘Utterly moreish’
Guardian

‘Absolutely jaw-dropping’
Natasha Poliszczuk

‘Brutally candid, exquisitely measured…gorgeous.’
Spectrum Culture

‘A masterpiece...an intensely rich and complex sensibility at work.’
Colm Tóibín

‘An intimate set of reflections on writing, love, friendship, ethics, landscape and the torments of a failing marriage.’
Blake Morrison, New Statesman

‘Compulsive reading’ 
Colm Tóibín, Irish Times

‘Have any writer’s journals since Virginia Woolf’s felt so vital?’ 
Ben Brooker, Australian Book Review

‘Garner is unsurpassed in her ability to sift through the muck of existence and transform it into poetry.’ 
Jonathan Ricketson, Australian Book Review

‘An extraordinary work.’ 
Lucy Caldwell, Irish Times

‘…if you’ve yet to convince anyone in your life of Garner’s unique genius, here’s their Christmas present sorted.’ 
Guardian

‘…a privilege to read.’ 
Readings

‘A vital, warts-and-all portrait of a truly great writer at work and one of the most engaging, heartfelt depictions of marital collapse ever committed to print.’ 
Daunt Books

‘Flinty brilliance.’ 
John Mullan, New Statesman

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Helen Helen Helen. I guess I'm a Helen Garner fan, after all.             Normally, I am not a diary reader. It feels intrusive, I guess? Generally, because they are released after the writer is no longer with us. This is not the case with How to End a Story.

   Not only is this extremely intimate and vulnerable, but reading about the ups and downs of relationships, the torturous slow demise of one, it is also celebratory and revealing. We are along with Garner on ups and downs in her career and awards. The doubts that lingered even after successful milestones. Revealing in the aspect of the social attitudes of the times. When I say the times, it spans many years. It's a time capsule, from mentioning the disaster at Chernobyl to the drowning of Jeff Buckley. 

   Honestly, this was a pleasure to read, and I think you could even start with this book if you've not experienced Garners magic before.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

truly excellent. I don’t think I’ve ever highlighted a book more.

[Holly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exactly what I needed. A book that feels like a guidepost for how to be a person and an artist.

[Faith · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have never read one of Helen Garner’s books before. Why would I jump into her diaries, totaling over 800 pages, that might expect me to have a certain familiarity with her work? Word of mouth. I had a passing familiarity with THE CHILDREN’S BACH, and somehow or another heard excellent things about her diaries, particularly her final one. When I saw they were being published for the first time together, I didn’t hesitate to request a copy.

As expected, contained are ordinary entries of work progress, arguments, stresses, parenting, friendships. There are also some lovely insights perfectly written. A commonplace book, where she includes excerpts from others. Perhaps the greatest pleasure is just the depth of material.

The entries are organized by years. Outside of that, though, it can be tough to tell if breaks are sometimes communicating light redactions having taken place within an entry, as there could be some continuity from one excerpt to the next, or whether they always signified a new entry. Names are typically initials, which could sometimes be confusing for me, but not enough to detract from the experience.

No surprise that over these pages, we witness changes in relationships and the consequences of actions over time. My investment grew the farther I read, perhaps because I felt more of a depth and attachment, but also likely that the tone and the vulnerability changed over the years. When her rage is detailed in depth, I was riveted and had such empathy for her (while also being a little shocked and entertained at her actions).

All in all, this is a treasure trove, detailing decades of private thoughts and experiences, if you are drawn to that sort of access.

(Thank you to Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for providing this book for review consideration via NetGalley. All opinions are my own.)

[Kim Six · Rating 5 out of 5]

I hate to admit I’d never heard of Helen Garner. I’ve never read any of her work and I don’t even typically read journals and memoirs but I picked this up after learning it won the Baillie Gifford award for non fiction. At 800+ pages and spanning 20 years it is an amazingly intimate and poignant look into the author’s life. Each entry is like unearthing a new treasure, with short mundane observations about the weather or someone on the street all the way to page long entries about her relationships, her struggle with motherhood and self worth and her search for who she is and what will make her happy.

I would go from giggles to downright horror at some of the things she lives through, decisions she makes and the people she associates with. I grew so frustrated as it is becomes more and more clear she is deceiving herself while simultaneously beating herself up for things she isn’t responsible for. By the end of the book I just wanted to scream “please get some self esteem.. you are better than the situation you are putting yourself in!”

That being said, those feelings, as frustrating as they were for me, were just evidence of how truly candid and real this work was. Knowing that this was her lived reality and she was willing to share it, warts and all.

By the end I was dying to know where things went from there.. and after a little research into her life after 1998, I learned she would go on to blossom both personally and professionally. On the other hand, her thoughtless self-centered ex-husband’s career would peak during their time together and fizzle out. Knowing that gave me great satisfaction and closure.

Maybe one day she’ll publish her journals from those years (1998-2026.) I’d be first in line to read them.

[Elena Jones · Rating 5 out of 5]

In How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998, Helen Garner opens a rare and intimate window into the making of a literary life. Spanning more than two decades, these journals trace the emotional, intellectual, and creative currents that shaped one of Australia’s most respected writers. What emerges is not just a record of events but a deeply human chronicle of ambition, love, loss, anger, motherhood, and the persistent struggle to turn lived experience into art.

The diaries reveal Garner in motion first as a young writer navigating early success, later as a woman confronting the complexities of relationships, and ultimately as an artist refining her voice through hardship and reinvention. The honesty is striking. There is no attempt to soften the sharp edges of grief, betrayal, or frustration, yet the pages are equally filled with humor, tenderness, and the quiet dignity of everyday moments.

What makes the collection especially powerful is the sense of watching a writer at work in real time. The entries show how observation, emotion, and reflection gradually transform into the clear-eyed portraits of ordinary lives under pressure that critics at The New York Times have long praised. This volume stands as both a personal record and a masterclass in attention, discipline, and truth-telling.

Ultimately, the diaries form a moving portrait of resilience. They capture the courage required to face one’s own life unflinchingly and to keep writing through uncertainty. The result is a work that feels raw, generous, and deeply alive an enduring testament to the creative power of self-examination.

[Jakobi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was my first encounter with Helen Garner, and it left a quiet but lasting impression. How to End a Story is built from diaries and fragments rather than a conventional narrative, and that form feels essential to what the book is trying to do. There is no neat arc, no resolution, no emotional punctuation at the end. Only the slow, honest unfolding of thought.

Garner writes with extraordinary attention to detail. Small moments, passing emotions, hesitations in language ... everything is observed closely, without embellishment or self-dramatisation.

I did find the use of initials slightly distancing. Understandable, maybe necessary, but it adds to the sense of emotional restraint that runs through the book. Still, that restraint feels deliberate. The book stays with me because of how carefully it notices what it feels like to live through something that never fully resolves.

What I found most striking is her refusal to force meaning onto experience. The story does not “end” in the traditional sense; it simply reaches the point where reflection can go no further.

[Megan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perfect.

Took me a while to appreciate it but once I was in I was in.

I wasn’t sure about the ethics of publishing these diaries however I heard her in a podcast say she contacted as many people as she could to offer them a chance to read their sections. No one objected.

Here we have the rise and fall of a marriage and the ecosystem around a relationship in detail and deep insight into a writerly life. It is deep and funny and full of philosophical questions.

Helen reveals a lot about her circle but mostly she reveals herself and all the lumps and bumps of her personality.

(I was disturbed by the visits to her psychotherapist. Not sure they were doing her any good.)

The WORK that has gone into structure, design, storytelling. It reads like a novel in short vignettes, retaining the classic three acts, rising and falling action. If this was fiction it would be Booker Prize worthy. A deserving winner of the Baillie Gifford Non Fiction 2025.

[Eolann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have never read a published diary before, so it took me a while to get into the rhythm of this. At a few points the records of daily minuate had my attention wandering, but Garner mixes these in with enough sharp observations to hold your interest, and the book gains momentum in the second half as the focus turns to the increasingly awful marriage she finds herself trapped in; seeing this fall to pieces (more or less in real time) over the course of the diaries is like watching a slow motion car crash. In the background of the marriage horror story, the diaries are also an unobtrusive record of aging and the change that comes with this; the Garner at the start of the book, still involved in a communal living environment of sex, drugs and rock and roll, is very different from the more settled, middle aged figure she incrementally turns into over the 20 year span of the collection.

[Lệ Lin · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I picked up this book, I assumed it would be a light-hearted, funny collection of diaries. I didn't expect glimpses of gut-wrenching murder cases and gossip, or the love affairs between those married in their forties and fifties. From the start of the affair to the end of Helen Garner’s marriage, I was vexed by how the story turned out but fascinated by Garner's sharp observation and precise, journalistic eye in describing the mundane events of her daily life. I admire her strength and courage, feel the heartbreak she endured, and how much it cost her inner peace. Helen Garner's diaries, compiled in this powerful book, "are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf's", as Rachel Cooke noted in The Guardian.

[Ela · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s something crude about reading someone else’s diaries; it feels icky and intrusive, particularly when they are published posthumously (as in Didion’s Notes to John). But Garner chose to publish hers during her lifetime, and she does not spare herself any exposure. Rich and vulnerable, Garner distills feelings I’ve long wrestled with into poignant, unflinching simplicity. At times, sections are so judgmental that I have had to step away for a few days, but I always end up returning, perhaps because this book, first and foremost, bears witness to the practice of writing, in all its mundane self-aggrandisement and self-flagellation.

[Peter Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely immersed in this 20 year diary over 6 weeks - it’s not just the pressure cooker third marriage with steam bursting out of every orifice but also the self-knowledge, the observations, the comments on books, films and music that combine to create a triumph for one woman and for all Australian women - ultimately a source book pinpointing twentieth century fin-de-siècle Australia for future generations. I look forward to further installments from this fascinating writer!

[Sandra S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved it - hope she publishes more of her diaries. Lots that resonated and much that is quote worthy. This, just one example, ( page 262 - 1987) written about dining with retired academics :-

‘ Spare me from old men’s calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience. Their wives are still real, warm people, compared with these old blokes frozen in their own importance.’

Sublime writing.

[Rosemary Baird Williams · Rating 5 out of 5]

800 pages. And I couldn’t leave it alone. There’s so much here: insight into how a writer thinks and works; the torturous ins and outs of a complicated unhappy relationship, being a mum and such a love of children. Everything is precisely described as to how it feels. So many wonderful pithy touching observations of human interactions; both friends and strangers. And then there’s all the dreams and psychoanalysis. It’s partial, biased, self doubting and so well written. I highly recommend.

[lauren brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

this woman and her words! I hoovered this thing up (in two chunks because I borrowed it from the library first, had to return it, but knew I had to own it). and althought it's 800 pages of snippets it doesn't feel fragmented or loose. it feels typically cinched, gentle and crisp at the same time. like a well-tailored linen dress.

[Linsey Fryatt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Glorious. Humane, warm and written with such intelligence. Self-reflection without self-regard. I highlighted so many quotes, her phrases are golden.

I feel nourished after this. It'll change you the way the best books do.

[Janice Hull · Rating 5 out of 5]

An interesting read as you can pick years and just read any year at a time. Snippets and thoughts of events and non throughout a year. The writing feels fresh , honest and open ended as they are often thoughts, personal observations.