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How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (Paperback)
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How to End a Story: Collected Diaries (Paperback)

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£20.00
Paperback 832 Pages
Published: 13/03/2025
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'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 Hub

Looking 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.

Publisher: Orion Publishing Co
ISBN: 9781399606745
Number of pages: 832
Dimensions: 198 x 129 mm


MEDIA REVIEWS

I revere Helen Garner's writing, and it's in her diaries that she's at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best - Nigella Lawson

Long before I was a writer, I was a Helen Garner reader and fan. Her collected diaries are entrancing. It's rare we get to track the development of a great writer at such close quarters from her earliest days, revealed to us with such energy, freshness and intensity. But it's all here: the fearlessness, the unapologetic honesty, the ruthless self-examination and most important of all, the clarity of her gaze, the great delicacy and precision of her language. I will return to these diaries for the rest of my days - Charlotte Wood

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. I must have underlined something on every page - Fatima Bhutto

Not since reading Virginia Woolf's collected diaries has the life and times of one exceptional writer leapt so vividly from the page. Helen Garner 's renaissance should be sealed with this landmark publication - a writer both absolutely of Australia and of the entire world - Catherine Taylor

Australia's greatest writer of nonfiction. How to End a Story concludes with one of the most candidly brutal accounts of the end of a creative marriage I've read - Observer

Intimate, precise, sharp, vivid and funny, Helen Garner's diaries grant us not only vital insight into her creative process and concerns, but also to the inner workings of a great mind engaged in the business of daily life - Lisa Owens

Many writers' diaries have been published, but none carry the singular acuity, wit, and electric grace of Helen Garner's. A blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy, they offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner's life over two decades - Leslie Jamison

Helen Garner is a genius who never stops paying attention. Her chilling account of a failing marriage is as propulsive as any thriller - Jessica Stanley

The diaries are the apotheosis of Helen Garner's entire career, and the most exciting thing she has ever published . . . Polished and spare, like the very short stories of Diane Williams and Lydia Davis . . . Beautiful, riveting, formally electrifying - Literary Hub

Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses - New Yorker

On the page, Garner is uncommonly fierce, though this usually has the effect on me of making her seem all the more likable. I relish her fractious, contrarian streak - she wears it as a chef would a bloody apron - Guardian

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