How to End a Story

'I revere Helen Garner's writing, and it's in her diaries that she's at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best' Nigella Lawson'I come back again and again to Garner's diaries and always find something new to admire. Her wit and observations are brilliant and her thoughts on writing are a guide' Daisy Johnson'I love Helen Garner's diaries. I would read her grocery lists' Fatima Bhutto'The diaries are the apotheosis of Helen Garner's entire career, and the most exciting thing she has ever published . . . Beautiful, riveting, formally electrifying' Lit HubLooking out the window at the two big gum trees, as it gets dark, I think: the only way I can go on keeping a diary - the bits about myself, anyway, i.e. most of it - is to conceive of it as a record of soul. Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Now she is widely recognised as one of the greatest writers of our age. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best.Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.

Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She worked as a high school teacher, then as a freelance journalist. Since 1977 she has published novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction, the 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include This House of Grief, Monkey Grip and The Children's Bach.