All My Small Things

Josh Billings reviews Helen Garner’s “How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978–1998.”

By Josh BillingsMarch 17, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

DO PEOPLE KEEP diaries anymore? In the age of social media, the practice can feel twee and artisanal, like contra dancing or making your own soap. Do we really need yet another forum for our narcissism—another corkboard to amass (and potentially display) our tidbits of congratulation and embarrassment?

And yet there is something so irresistible about reading diaries: the bite-size entries, the eavesdropped revelations, the thrill of seeing someone both indulging and resisting their own storytelling. This last appeal is especially compelling when the diarist is a writer, and even more if she’s a narrative one—for then the feeling that one’s days add up to something larger is simultaneously what the diarist is trying to escape and what she wants to get back again.

In the case of Helen Garner, the Australian author whose collected diaries from 1978 to 1998 Penguin has just published as How to End a Story (the book came out down under in 2021 via Text Publishing), we see how useful a diary can be—not just in her personal life but in her professional one as well. Here, for example, is an entry from 1978, describing a short trip that Garner and her first husband, “F” (whom she will soon divorce), take through the French forest:

F and I took our bikes on the train to the forest of Compiègne and rode along the paths and avenues. Only one squabble. Pale green leaves everywhere. Blue flowers like cloud shimmered in the clearings. A deer bounded across the road in front of us—it came flying from nowhere, struck the ground a single blow with its dainty hooves, and took off again into the trees. In a cafe we raved about it to the barman. He was too bored even to fake interest. We felt foolish and urban; drank up and pedalled away.

The entry displays many of Garner’s most appealing characteristics: her waltzy rhythm (“We felt foolish and urban; drank up and pedalled away”); her sketchbook description (“Blue flowers like cloud”); her gossipy, vaguely illicit tone. The central effect—the oxymoron created by putting the violent “struck the ground a single blow” next to the deer’s “dainty hooves”—is both great writing and a hidden self-portrait of this woman whose own formidable daintiness we have already glimpsed two sentences earlier, with that “Only one squabble.” Here is someone who knows how to strike, softly, a killing blow.

As with the best Garner, however, the main achievement of the entry isn’t what it says: it’s how much it doesn’t say. It doesn’t tell us, for example, that Garner and F’s marriage is on the rocks, or that she feels homesick and out of place in France. It definitely doesn’t admit that, after the great success with her first novel Monkey Grip (1977), she is having trouble moving on to her next project (“the thing I’m supposed to be writing,” as she refers to it in another entry). Rather than locking us out, her reticence invites us into the drama of the moment, encouraging us to draw our own inferences. We do this, happily, in part because as readers we like to draw conclusions and in part because, like Garner, we want to believe that even the most mundane moments can simmer on the border of some larger, perpetually unarticulated significance.

This feeling of immanence—the something-is-happening tingle that is the lifeblood of great narrative, whether its scope is the fate of the universe or the failure of a love affair—is one of the great strengths of Garner’s fiction. But when we step back from the spell of novels like Monkey Grip, what we really marvel at is how patient her writing is—how willingly it stays in those moments of apparent storylessness that so much other fiction either shies away from or simply doesn’t see. This is true of How to End a Story too, almost every page of which contains some glimpse or perception whose effect is not to wrap us up in significance but to give us a break from it—a momentary opportunity to put down the stories we’ve been telling ourselves and take a look around: “From a chaise longue outside my back door I survey my backyard, its complete stillness, the fine element of damp in the air, the stars thinly sprinkled above the shed”; “The nun talked about a man sitting opposite her on a tram: ‘I liked his face because it reminded me of my own’”; “A hawk on a tree. We saw its shoulders.”

So much modern prose is chained to post-Flaubertian ideas of efficiency and “killing your darlings” that entries like these can seem to be operating on a kind of throwback economy, like stalls at a Renaissance fair. They don’t exist for anything; or at least, they don’t exist for anything more than the delight of their own attention. Still, there is a way that the cumulative effect of so much noticing makes its own argument—for by jotting down such minor moments, Garner is also making a case for their importance. She is saying to us (and to herself) that small things are worth paying attention to, and that by writing about them, she is not wasting her time but rather laying the groundwork for the more “official” literature she will go on to write.

One of the recurring pleasures of How to End a Story is watching Garner make the case for this kind of off-the-grid noticing, and the writing that grows out of it, over and over again. Sometimes her arguments are sharp and undeniable, but other times they’re searching and insistent, as if she were trying to work out an artist’s statement for some skeptical gallery owner. Reading the more grasping entries, we want to reach out and comfort her—to let her know that, from our position outside the story, we can see that everything will eventually work out: her writing will be recognized, small will be the new large, Melbourne really will turn out to have been one of the cultural centers of the 20th century. And yet, we understand that doing this would ruin the whole thing, since one of the main points of the diary is to help her think through the superficial anxieties of her days and toward a less assailable purpose, as in these distinct passages from various years:

About writing: meaning is in the smallest event. It doesn’t have to be put there: only revealed.

What I love on my desk is the notebooks I’ve typed up, their freshness, their un-public tone, their glancing quality and high sensuous awareness. Nothing ‘serious’ I write can ever match these.

I need to free myself from the hierarchy with the novel on top. I need to devise a form that is flexible and open enough to contain all my details, all my small things. If only I could blow out realism while at the same time sinking deeply into what is most real.

Self-lacerating as such entries can be, they also seem to spring from a deeper sense of confident playfulness—as if, while Garner did consider writing a matter of life and death, she also understood that it was something not to take too seriously. In this way, she reminds us of that other great 20th-century diarist, Witold Gombrowicz, who bragged in his Dziennik (1969) that aesthetics for the writer were essentially a kind of mental toy. Similarly, in Garner’s, certain 1980s- and ’90s-era received ideas about art come and go, getting a think and then drifting off, so frequently that eventually we realize the actual struggle has nothing to do with them. In this way, Garner’s willingness to try on (and let go of) ideas demonstrates an openness to outside influence that is itself weirdly resilient, if only because it always ends up coming back to its own story.

This struggle for self-definition, in work and in life, becomes even more complicated when we consider the other main thread of How to End a Story—that is, the romantic relationships that Garner pursues over the 20 years that the book covers. At its opening, with her marriage to then-husband F dissolving, this dimension can seem like a distraction from the real interest, her writing, which is just beginning to take off seriously after the success of Monkey Grip. But as the entries progress, we begin to understand how wrapped up in each other love and writing are for Garner—how much they feed on and cannibalize one another, so that arguments made in one sphere repeat in the other:

He went upstairs and turned the TV on full blast. I swept up the mess. I bawled a lot as I swept, and then as I washed my plain, spotty, forty-year-old face and looked at it in the mirror and thought that I couldn’t bear having to go through another bout of this BATTLING. I also thought, I am about to get my period. It absolutely shits me that this should explain anything. I objectively do most of the housework and it’s NOT FAIR. After I’d washed my face I took off my pants and they were stained black with blood.

This flaming book is jammed again. I feel my ignorance and fear like a vast black hole.

The frustration of all this is suffocating, but as always, there is a sense of process to the juxtaposition too—the feeling that painful events are being worked, by their inclusion in the diary, into something that makes sense. So, even during her most outrageous moments of domestic eruption (and there are plenty of these in How to End a Story), we can see a small part of Garner standing to one side, relishing the telling detail of those stained pants and the yards of broken dishes. It is all so hellish, as life, but as art, it’s irresistible—a fact that we can see when we read the “flaming book” that Garner does in fact manage to finish during this period, The Children’s Bach (1984). Her most spare and rigorous work, the novel nevertheless manages to paint a picture of human relationships that is as comically hopeless as Jane Austen. And yet even that masterpiece doesn’t contain a sentence as heartbreaking as this diary entry, from right after F has moved out: “I do feel sad though at the way the sun passes unobstructed through his empty room.”

As with all superpowers, however, the diary writer’s ability to turn life into work (and vice versa) contains its own dangers—as we see when we turn to the relationship that provides the motor and frame for the second half of How to End a Story: Garner’s involvement with V, an older man who is married when she first meets him. He is also a writer, a fact that perversely offers the same combination of obstacle and incentive to Garner’s attraction that his marriage does:

Found an old literary magazine containing an interview with V. His sentences were so dry as to be starchy, perfectly constructed in a way that made me feel exhausted and slightly panicky. He is married. He is an intellectual. He is only messing with me. And I have dropped my guard. Reading at random in Canetti: ‘It seems that one cannot be severe all of a lifetime. It seems that something takes vengeance in one, and one becomes like everyone else.’ Is this the sort of stuff V would write? Painful speculations, sometimes grinding, always trying to tackle the worst, the least attractive, what cannot be made beautiful?

Objectively speaking, V’s success as a writer is not out of proportion with Garner’s own, but it intimidates and challenges her, forcing her not to think through the quality of her own work so much as the quality of her self. So their relationship, which begins with a long affair but eventually progresses to the two of them moving in together and getting married, is from the very beginning figured as a kind of war, with the established intellectual male on one side, characterized by his love of fine art and Central European novelists (the quote from Canetti is no accident), and on the other the younger, brilliant, but “untutored” female who writes about love and sex. For a while, the skirmishing is spry and inventive, leading frequently to the kind of grudging mutual relish that we can recognize as happiness. But the small losses add up as the story progresses, creating a sinking feeling that becomes impossible to ignore: “We’re engaged in a bitter struggle to define ourselves, each against the other. He sets his face against things that have meaning to me; and my urge is to split hairs and demand exactitude. I suppose I’m just as unbearable to him as he is to me.”

By the time Garner has begun to associate her marriage with her inability to write novels (fiction being V’s thing), we understand that their marriage is doomed—and yet it is a testament to Garner’s thoroughness as a self-examiner that we can’t say exactly where it does end. In fiction, of course, such postmortems are easier: we can point to specific scenes, tracing the love affair from heady beginning to tawdry conclusion. But in a diary, even the most dramatic fight is subsumed as soon as it happens. Apartments are wrecked, awful truths muttered, infidelities brought to light; but then there is the white space like a camera cut, and the two survivors are lying in bed, or cooking dinner, or putting their things in boxes. Life goes on. And it is a huge part of Garner’s genius that she lets them go, admitting disasters big and small without needing to see any one of them as The End.

It is in this last capacity—her willingness to let events unfold according to their own inner logic, instead of rushing them toward some already-worked-out finale—that we find Garner’s uniqueness as a writer. Predictably for a woman of her era, she is a survivor, a veteran of the constant fight for recognition and self-definition that so many of her counterparts either took on without thinking about it or had bestowed upon them. But the presence in her writing is her own: an achieved poise that owes nothing and everything to the currents passing through her. In her diary—more so even than in her fiction and nonfiction—we find a way to survive that feels less like a riddle and more like a recipe we can follow. That does not make it easy. How to end a story? Step one: Begin it. Step two: Wait.