From Claudia Keep’s portfolio, Interiors, in issue no. 246 of The Paris Review.
What secret desires and resentments are tucked inside the people we love? A little girl’s diary, with its tiny lock and key, testifies to the impulse to keep parts of ourselves hidden, but it’s impossible to look at a locked diary without imagining breaking it open.
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: a genre beholden to the insight that rises from immediacy rather than retrospection. Many writers’ diaries have been published, but far fewer have been published in their lifetimes—and none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner’s. An Australian national treasure known for her novels of domestic nuance and entanglement (Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach) and journalism of grand sorrow and fierce controversy (The First Stone, This House of Grief), Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials: fresh, raw, vibrating with life. “Like being given a painting you love gleaming with the still wet paint,” 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 (“The writers’ festival. It’s like being barbecued”) to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure (“tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth”), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass: “Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you’re taking it. Emotion doesn’t give a shit whether anyone’s looking or not.”
The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade 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.
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’s life over two decades— two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter’s coming-of-age—but 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 “trivial” 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. “In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”
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 “ridged as neat and fine as salmon flesh” and “the rodent flowing of squirrels” 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. “Crazy about the way Proust uses physical objects to keep his huge, billowing sentences grounded,” 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 stashed in her outdoor toilet; a friend describing his wife’s homemade bread: “the sort of bread you want to peel open and lie down in.” 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): “just 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.”
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? “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner has said, inviting us to consider the possibility that there’s not necessarily a direct correlation between time passed and insight gained, as if you will necessarily “know” 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’s diaries are full of this intimate entwining of knowing and feeling, like two lovers tangled up in the sheets of an unmade bed.
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Garner’s first volume of collected diaries, Yellow Notebook, 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’s first novel, Monkey Grip, has just won a major prize, but Garner is wrestling with whether her writing is too “small” in its scope. “Everyone’s talking about Apocalypse Now,” she laments. “My work seems piddling, narrow, domestic.” 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. “One day I’ll have to burn this book,” she writes. “I use as buckets of cold water thoughts of his wife’s preparations for Christmas.”
The second volume, One Day I’ll Remember This (1987–1995), tracks Garner’s deepening affair with V, as well as Garner navigating M’s leaving home: “This state is like a second labour. I’m struggling to let her be born,” she writes. A friend tells her, “A brand-new abyss. I envy you. Don’t fill it up with old things.” 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: “They’re both writers, though,” 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: “When we see couples who are cheerfully loving we exchange sad, wry glances.” 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—at one point Garner girds herself to “accept that I have enemies, and be robust about it.”
The title of Garner’s third volume, How to End a Story (1995–1998), 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’s 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’s relationship with X, a painter, and Garner’s relationship with her analyst, who points out that she often lies on the couch in a fetal position, sometimes clutching her scarf “like a comforter, or a bottle.” V worries that analysis will threaten her artistic life, that it promises to too neatly solve or defuse the “family unravelling” 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 “professional development” on her taxes, her triumph at this accomplishment so fervent it gets italicized, “they allowed it!”)
We meet X at her fortieth birthday party: “She uses her body expressively, in ways that are un-Australian—turns of the head, graceful arm and hand gestures.” 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’s marriage as X and V develop a consuming friendship that Garner suspects has become an affair: “If you’re a man’s second wife you know for a fact that he’s capable of anything.”
One of the great hardships of V’s intimacy with the painter X is not just the sting of romantic betrayal but the fact that jealousy obstructs Garner’s relationship with her own powers of observation: “I didn’t know any more how to be happy or to enjoy, for example, the glorious beauty of the ocean and the summer sky.” 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 “turning away to something more interesting.” In their constant pivots, the diaries often offer a version of this relief from claustrophobia, turning from domestic conflict to the world outside—the city, friends, work, daughter—like opening a window in a dim, stale room and letting in fresh breeze, oxygen, sunlight or moonlight, or the smell of rain.
As ever, Garner is attuned to both the existential depths of romantic conflict and the banal surfaces of how these conflicts play out. “Since we were writers, each of us had a horror of being engulfed by the other,” she writes, “and had to fight against it.” But so often these deep conflicts express themselves through the materials of petty grievances: “Contest between me and V about what each of us has done to keep the soap from going mucky in the bathroom.” There’s 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’s 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’s expensive new running shoes. “I long to say, ‘Sweetheart. I have cut up a straw hat with scissors and drowned cigars in soup. We are sisters.’ ”)
Garner takes her heartbreak with her to Buenos Aires (“I trudge up and down the avenidas lugging my smashed and bleeding heart”) and then to Antarctica for a travel piece (“I wish I could have a clean heart. Mine’s like an ashtray. Full of Cohiba butts and spit”). She finds the air so clean and cold it’s like a numbing agent—“inside of my head is an ice landscape, an element of brutal clarity, like the first snort of cocaine”—and a sense of wonder and gratitude in pushing her face into the “tight, springy moss-pads” left in the wake of an ancient glacier: “The concrete inside me started to soften and give way.”
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The Künstlerroman, 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’s diaries, we find, among other things, a stunning Künstlerroman 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’s 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. “Nothing can touch me,” she writes, in the midst of consuming marital conflict. “The power of work. Art, and the huge, quiet power it gives.”
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, “I 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.” In toggling back and forth so dynamically between her own interiority and other peoples’ lives, these diaries give lie to the assumption that being interested in yourself necessarily means you are less interested in other people. Garner’s diaries—indeed, the arc and range of her entire career—suggests another truth entirely: that deep introspection and outward curiosity are often symbiotic.
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: “A slit opened in the capsicum’s side and it began to suck voraciously.”) She nails the frustration of unproductive writing sessions (“now that I’m 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”) and confesses the sting of not being included in the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature, but she gives us the good stuff, too, like the triumphant sensation of finding the right place in a novel for a detail that’s been “dogging” her for a decade. If Horace coined the term ars poetica to describe a poem that explains the art of poetry, then perhaps Garner has given us an ars diarium—insofar as these diaries skillfully, glintingly, make a case for their own mattering, a quicksilver manifesto sewn like a glimmering thread through these pages: “Meaning is in the smallest event,” she reflects. “It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.”
At one point near the end of their marriage, Garner writes, “V says that women’s writing ‘lacks an overarching philosophy,’” and records her own brisk reply: “I don’t even know what this means. Also, I don’t care.” Tonally, this is pure Garner: colloquial and self-possessed, jaunty and winking, supple and wry—but not huffy. And while it’s true that there’s nothing I would call an “overarching philosophy” 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.
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, “I love intellectuals who hesitate.” She is fascinated by a man who keeps but doesn’t read his parents’ letters to each other: “Perhaps he doesn’t want to lose the state of having a secret from himself; or to reach the end of the mystery, the bottom of the bag.” One senses Garner doesn’t really believe in the bottom of the bag; instead, she believes in the generative understanding that she can’t ever fully understand herself. “What is the point of this diary?” she asks. “There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.”
These diaries are not only generous with the soaked sponge of daily life, they are also generous with the reader, inviting and rewarding many different modes of reading. You can disappear into them for hours, like swimming deep into the ocean of another person’s life. But you can also read them in tiny doses—just a few entries at a time, in moments stolen from precisely the kinds of obligations and relationships the diaries document—without 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. “Ludmilla will be forty-nine forever!” 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.
From the introduction to Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998, to be published by Pantheon this month. Read our Art of Fiction interview with Garner here.
Leslie Jamison is the author of books including Splinters and The Empathy Exams. She teaches at Columbia University.
An earlier version of this essay misidentified the Oxford Anthology of Australian Literature. It has been updated.
