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The love problem

Helen Garner and the fissures between fact and fiction
by
January–February 2022, no. 439

How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998 by Helen Garner

Text Publishing, $29.99 hb, 248 pp

The love problem

Helen Garner and the fissures between fact and fiction
by
January–February 2022, no. 439
Helen Garner (original photograph by Darren James/Text Publishing)
Helen Garner (original photograph by Darren James/Text Publishing)

The first two volumes of Helen Garner’s diaries – Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020) – cover eight years apiece. This one covers three. It is an intense, even claustrophobic story of the breakup of a marriage – a story told in the incidental, fragmentary form of a diary.

In an earlier volume, Garner wrote: ‘I would like to write about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other.’ And, ‘Later, a dream: some kind of dark, dumb attraction between V and me.’ Now here it is: a story of the struggles between people who love each other, and their slow waking out of it. How to End a Story starts just after the publication of Garner’s book The First Stone (1995), a book that she started writing at about the time that she started on the relationship with V. A lot of the entries in How to End a Story reflect, one way or another, on ‘the trouble between women and men’. Even seemingly digressive parts of the diary reflect back on the question. She and a friend visit the new Armani store: they compare its clothes for women with its clothes for men. They prefer the latter. She is told that her haircut is ‘too short’; she calls it ‘blokeish’. Her daughter gets married; she remembers how her father thwarted her first wedding. She visits her parents: when her father leaves the room, he turns out the light, leaving his wife and daughter in the dark. She and V pass a couple fighting in the street. Passing that place the next day, V says, ‘I wonder what happened to that bloke.’ She quotes Proust on jealousy; Richard Ford from Women with Men.

Lisa Gorton reviews 'How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998' by Helen Garner

How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998

by Helen Garner

Text Publishing, $29.99 hb, 248 pp

Comment (1)

  • Thank you for this, Lisa. All the things there but over Garner's shoulder or under the desk were coming to me as I read it. Was driven to read Badiou: 'In Le Dépeupleur, or The Lost One, the place is a giant rubber cylinder where the variations of light, sound, and temperature are regulated by rigorous laws that are empirically observable and yet conceptually unknown. A simple cosmos, purified, reduced to the complex of closure and legality.'

    I'm struck by how we're living in a world in denial of the conceptual laws we nevertheless must endure.
    Posted by Paul Voermans
    31 December 2021

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