HOW TO END A STORY

Recounting a writer’s days.

Award-winning Australian novelist, journalist, and screenwriter Garner has gathered three volumes of her previously published diaries from 1978 to 1998 to create an intimate chronicle of life, love, family, and the frustrations of writing and aging. As Leslie Jamison writes in an appreciative introduction, the diaries read like “a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy,” as Garner reflects on her daughter’s growing up, her marriages coming apart, and her body inevitably changing during menopause. At 45, she notices “a single white hair” and pulls it out. Shopping, drinking, cleaning house, cooking meals and sharing dinners out, seeing friends, traveling to the U.S., London, and Paris: All these activities fill her days, with writing the center of her life. At times, the world intrudes into her pages: a coup, a rebellion, an assassination, and even Princess Diana, driving past in a Rolls-Royce. “Such a pretty girl,” Garner remarks. The diaries also serve as commonplace books, punctuated with salient passages from an assortment of writers, including Goethe, Cocteau, Peter Handke, Camus, Thomas Merton, Barbara Pym, Jung, Germaine Greer, and Richard Ford. Garner praises writers she admires—among them, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and Raymond Carver, while her own work often generates self-doubt. She feels wretched, she notes in 1979, writing three sentences a day. “I’m scared to go to my office in case I can’t make things up,” she confesses a few years later. As devoted as she is to her diary, in 1989, suddenly regretting her “endless self-obsession, anecdotes, self-excuses, rationalisations. Meanness about others,” Garner announces, “I think I might burn all these diaries.” Happily, she did not.

Sharp observations and revelations make for lively reading.