A curious feature of the creamy new edition of Helen Garner’s diaries: it carries only one blurb, and it is not by some literary heavyweight but by Nigella Lawson. At first, I found this confounding, but I soon began to see parallels between the two. Both are funny, spontaneous sensualists; both have been subjected to harsh public scrutiny and experienced a certain degree of messiness in their personal lives; and both are magnificent women. In the words of Anne Enright, they are, in their various ways, ‘acclaimed celebrator[s] of the poetic quotidian’.