{"id":550827,"date":"2025-11-05T14:16:12","date_gmt":"2025-11-05T14:16:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/550827\/"},"modified":"2025-11-05T14:16:12","modified_gmt":"2025-11-05T14:16:12","slug":"im-never-surprised-when-i-read-about-a-woman-murdering-a-man-helen-garner-on-her-baillie-gifford-prize-winning-diaries-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/550827\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m never surprised when I read about a woman murdering a man\u2019: Helen Garner on her Baillie Gifford prize-winning diaries | Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Helen Garner was announced as the winner<\/a> of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in London on Tuesday night, the 82-year-old Australian author was 16,000km <\/strong>away in Melbourne, watching the ceremony on a live stream at home on what was for her Wednesday morning. When the big moment came, she heard \u201cthe winner is \u2026\u201d \u2013 and then the feed froze. \u201cWe were going, \u2018Oh God!\u2019 Running around. We didn\u2019t know what to do. The timing was like something in a comedy.\u201d Congratulations immediately rushed in, which is how she knew she\u2019d won the \u00a350,000 (A$100,000) prize for How to End a Story<\/a>, an 800-page collection of her astoundingly frank diaries, kept between 1978 and 1998.<\/p>\n

Garner is still grappling with her win when we speak a few hours later. \u201cI\u2019m a stunned mullet,\u201d she says, sitting in her study, wrapped in a lilac shawl and with glasses on a cord around her neck. \u201cI didn\u2019t think I had a chance.\u201d She has absolutely no idea what she said in her thank you speech: \u201cI think I\u2019m in shock.\u201d<\/p>\n

In her 80s, Garner is experiencing a career high. After decades of being ignored overseas, \u201cAustralia\u2019s Joan Didion\u201d has become cool. Carrie Bradshaw recently toted a hardback of Garner\u2019s debut novel Monkey Grip <\/a>in an episode of And Just Like That, as if it were a must-have purse, while Dua Lipa (\u201ca complete sweetheart\u201d) picked Garner\u2019s account<\/a> of a murder trial, This House of Grief<\/a>, for her enormously popular book club<\/a>. Garner is \u201cthrilled to bits\u201d by all of this. \u201cMy street cred has gone through the roof!\u201d she laughs.<\/p>\n

\u2018A complete sweetheart\u2019 \u2026 Dua Lipa poses with a copy of This House of Grief. Photograph: Permanent Press Media<\/p>\n

When Monkey Grip was published in 1977, Australian critics were dismissive, even outraged, by its clear autobiographical inspirations. \u201cHelen Garner has published her private journal rather than written a novel,\u201d one sniffed. It was a charge Garner could hardly deny, having spent months drawing from her diaries to write its story of the love affair between a divorced single mother and a heroin addict in Melbourne.<\/p>\n

\u201cAlthough it was true, I huffily defended myself against that claim, because it rests upon the idea that writing a diary is sloppy,\u201d she says. \u201cThat it is just some sludgy flow of feminine whinging that comes out of a woman and she writes it down and calls it a book. I was enraged on a deep level by the suggestion that diaries were muck and not worthy of people\u2019s attention. Now I\u2019m happy to say that Monkey Grip was based on my diaries.\u201d<\/p>\n

Almost 50 years later, she is winning acclaim and prizes for publishing her actual diaries. She loves that How to End a Story has won a prize for nonfiction, a term normally reserved for grander histories: \u201cThe fact that my diaries were flung into that big category called nonfiction \u2013 I thought, \u2018Hooray! They found a home.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

How to End a Story is really three volumes, starting after the birth of her daughter Alice (M in the diaries) and her divorce from her first husband, Bill Garner. The first (1978-1987) opens just after Monkey Grip was published and maps out the collapse of her second marriage, to Frenchman Jean-Jacques Portail. The second (1987-1995) finds her beginning an affair with the (married) Australian novelist Murray Bail, while the third (1995-1998) charts the end of their marriage \u2013 her third and final. (She has been happily divorced ever since.)<\/p>\n

The Garner of the diaries seems so far away from the grande dame of today. She is nervy and weepy, desperate for praise and scorchingly self-critical. \u201cI will never be a great writer,\u201d she writes in one entry. \u201cThe best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people\u2019s gullets so that they remember them.\u201d But she is also great company: observant and smart, able to find beauty in the smallest of moments. \u201cSpring night: black sky speckled with stars, air cool and thickly scented with grass, and the odours of things growing.\u201d And humour too: \u201cAt the hippies\u2019 house for dinner, I find in my slice of quiche two foreign items: a dead match and a pubic hair. I hide them under a lettuce leaf and we go on talking.\u201d She puts words to even her strangest impulses; after seeing a peacock \u201cpreening like a Brazilian drag queen\u201d, she fights \u201ca powerful urge to run out there and sink the toe of my boot into his fluffy arse\u201d.<\/p>\n

The cover of How to End a Story. Photograph: Text Publishing<\/p>\n

Almost every reviewer has noted the ferocity of Garner\u2019s anger on the page \u2013 towards husbands, bad friends, some children, complete strangers. \u201cAnger is often very shameful for women,\u201d Garner tells me. \u201cI never feel surprised when I read about a woman murdering a man,\u201d she adds, offering a glimpse of the writer who has haunted so many Australian courtrooms over the years. \u201cI have noticed and understood just how much we have to cop in order to live a peaceful life. Sometimes, a woman will just snap. I figure that they wouldn\u2019t if we didn\u2019t have to crush the anger and pretend it\u2019s not happening.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Garner, writing a diary is an \u201cintellectually and psychologically serious\u201d exercise; she probes her own behaviour and thoughts, and tests the limits of her observation skills. They are also technically serious, \u201ca sort of daily practice\u201d, she says, for all of the books that were released around them.<\/p>\n

For years, her novels were seen as too domestic to be significant, while her nonfiction featured too much of herself to be objective. She is sure much of this was sexism. \u201cBack in the 70s, women writers were always criticised for being too narrow and, looking back, too personal. But people didn\u2019t actually say that \u2013 we were \u2018small canvas\u2019. Everybody had to be writing four-generation family sagas. People don\u2019t talk like that any more. And if they do, they don\u2019t have any power.\u201d<\/p>\n

But by the 2010s, Garner was a national treasure at home. Her Australian publisher Text even put her shopping list<\/a> online because so many readers said they would literally read anything she wrote. When publishing her diaries was first floated, Garner\u2019s initial thought was, \u201cThere\u2019s no way I\u2019d do that.\u201d She had actually destroyed her first diaries, burning a pile in her back yard in Fitzroy North in the 1980s: \u201cI thought, these are really trashy, they\u2019re boring and shit, so I\u2019m going to burn them.\u201d<\/p>\n

But when she revisited the later diaries and realised they were interesting and written carefully, she set herself some rules: she would edit out \u201cthe boring stuff, the day\u2019s residue\u201d, but she would not rewrite entries. She contacted friends and family to warn them if they appeared. \u201cOther people I did not consult because I thought they had it coming, to put it crudely,\u201d she says. Names would be changed, she wrote, and if anyone wanted to see the entries they were in, they could: \u201cI wasn\u2019t exactly asking permission, but if somebody really, really didn\u2019t want me to say something, I wouldn\u2019t. But I was very happy that a lot of people wrote back and said, \u2018I trust you.\u2019 That was a wonderful moment for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Anger is often very shameful for women\u2019 \u2026 Garner. Photograph: Charlie Kinross<\/p>\n

Garner likes her diaries more than anything else she has written. \u201cI feel free when I\u2019m writing in my diary. I\u2019m not writing to please anybody else, I don\u2019t have a deadline and I can say things in there that I wouldn\u2019t say elsewhere.\u201d Though, she adds, \u201cThere are things I don\u2019t put in my diaries, now I\u2019ve got the reputation for publishing them \u2013 I suppose some people must quake in their boots.\u201d<\/p>\n

She still keeps a diary today, scratching away with a fountain pen while sitting in bed first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Her subjects have changed since her last published volume: her three grandchildren, who have lived next door all their lives and make many entertaining cameos in Garner\u2019s writing, are now all over 18. \u201cMy years of being a hands-on nanna are over, to my great sadness,\u201d Garner says. \u201cSo my life is different and my diary is different.\u201d<\/p>\n

She is also noticing signs of cognitive decline. \u201cI\u2019m starting to forget a lot of things,\u201d she says. Her mother died of Alzheimer\u2019s at 82, and she worries about \u201ccracking up\u201d. Some words take longer to come. \u201cBut the most annoying thing is, I make spelling mistakes now,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m fanatical about spelling and punctuation. And now I flip back and think, \u2018What is that word?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But she is still Helen Garner; even her own ageing is something to observe forensically. \u201cI find it very interesting,\u201d she muses. \u201cI actually feel that I am old now. I\u2019ll be 83 this week and I don\u2019t know how much longer I\u2019ve got.\u201dRegardless of whether there are any more books in her, she will continue writing her diaries until the day she dies. \u201cI can\u2019t imagine finding life boring,\u201d she says, with a small, satisfied smile. \u201cThe world around me is so interesting. There is always something to write about, so I\u2019ll keep going.\u201d<\/p>\n

How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner is published by Wiedenfeld & Nicolson in the UK (\u00a330) and by Text Publishing in Australia (A$59.99). To support the Guardian order your copy from guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Helen Garner was announced as the winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in London on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":550828,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-550827","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115497519273800360","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550827","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=550827"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/550827\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/550828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=550827"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=550827"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=550827"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}