How to End a Story

About How to End a Story

For the first time ever, collected here are all three volumes of the diaries of Helen Garner—an Australian literary master, who famously pulled her greatest works straight from the pages of her own journals

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of “ordinary people in difficult times” (New York Times). But the inspiration for it all was her extensive collection of diaries—fastidiously kept, intricately written, and delightfully dishy, unspooling the inner lives of her insular world in bohemian Melbourne.

Now, for the first time, all three volumes of Garner’s inimitable diaries are collected into one book. Spanning more than two decades, each finely etched volume reveals Garner like never before: a fledgling author publishing her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s; in the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s. And all the while, they bear witness to one of the world’s great writers hard at work. 

Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger—but also of resilience, quotidian moments of joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.