How to End a Story

January 1, 2025
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 apretty 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.

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Starred review from March 1, 2025
A diary is a repository for thoughts and experiences, both profound and mundane. In Australian novelist and journalist Garner's hands, it's the pillow that stifles a scream, the carriage that nestles a baby, the urn that preserves the ashes of love and dreams. As shrewdly as Garner's novels traverse the minefields of domestic life and interpersonal relationships, her diaries opulently weave fragments of observations into a bewitching whole. Writers agonize over the details to include and omit, and Garner is no less scrupulous in her own self-evaluation. Through three volumes spanning two decades, Garner explores recurring themes of self-doubt as a writer and as a woman. The nature of her desires also land under the microscope as she broods over her love affair with, marriage to, and eventual divorce from a fellow writer. In dreams and treasured quotations, conversations and therapy sessions, Garner uncovers the texture of minutiae, the vibration of grand thoughts, and the aftertaste of defeat. By the end, Garner is scorched, but like a spore rejuvenated by a cleansing fire, she emerges reanimated. Offering intoxicating insight into the creative mind, Garner's diaries will tantalize the voyeur and inspire fellow visionaries who embrace such journeys of discovery.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.