How to End a Story
by Helen Garner
Summary
Helen Garner has been keeping a diary all her writing life, and this collection gathers the volumes covering 1978 to 1998: from the aftermath of Monkey Grip, when Australia's most scrutinised new novelist was working out what the fuss had bought her, through the height of her fame and controversy, to the slow, magnificently documented collapse of her third marriage, which gives the collection its title and its terrible momentum.
The diary form is Garner's native register. Everything arrives in the same clear, curious, self implicating voice: the writing table and its despairs, money, God, friendships conducted at kitchen tables, the film scripts and the fights, the reception of The First Stone splitting the country, dreams recorded with a novelist's respect for their strangeness, and always the marriage, to a fellow novelist the diaries call V, a union of two writers in one house in which the reader watches, entry by entry, the oxygen deplete. Garner cuts nothing that makes her look petty, jealous, cruel or credulous, which is the source of the whole effect: the diaries read as fiction shaped, but sworn.
The last volume, the ending of the title, is as gripping as anything she has written: infidelity suspected, confirmed, lived alongside, and finally walked away from, a masterclass in how a self assembles the story it can survive.
Around eight hundred pages across the three collected volumes.
Best for readers who want the diary as major literary form, and the most honest sustained self portrait in contemporary letters.
Historical Context & Significance
How to End a Story won the Baillie Gifford Prize in 2025, the first diaries ever to take the award, with all six judges calling the book remarkable and addictive; for Garner, eighty two, the win capped an unusual arc: the volumes had been published separately in Australia to acclaim before the collected edition carried them to Britain.
Helen Garner's standing in Australia has no exact parallel elsewhere: novelist of Monkey Grip and The Children's Bach, and the country's most argued about nonfiction writer, The First Stone on a sexual harassment case, Joe Cinque's Consolation and This House of Grief in the courtrooms, a career spent testing how much honesty prose can carry.
The international rediscovery of the 2020s, reissues, a younger readership arriving through the diaries, made the prize feel to many like a lifetime award that happened to attach to her most intimate book, which is fitting: the diaries are the workshop of everything else.