When Helen Garner was announced as the winner of the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction in London on Tuesday night, the 82-year-old Australian author was 16,000km 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 “the winner is …” – and then the feed froze. “We were going, ‘Oh God!’ Running around. We didn’t know what to do. The timing was like something in a comedy.” Congratulations immediately rushed in, which is how she knew she’d won the £50,000 (A$100,000) prize for How to End a Story, an 800-page collection of her astoundingly frank diaries, kept between 1978 and 1998.
Garner is still grappling with her win when we speak a few hours later. “I’m a stunned mullet,” she says, sitting in her study, wrapped in a lilac shawl and with glasses on a cord around her neck. “I didn’t think I had a chance.” She has absolutely no idea what she said in her thank you speech: “I think I’m in shock.”
In her 80s, Garner is experiencing a career high. After decades of being ignored overseas, “Australia’s Joan Didion” has become cool. Carrie Bradshaw recently toted a hardback of Garner’s debut novel Monkey Grip in an episode of And Just Like That, as if it were a must-have purse, while Dua Lipa (“a complete sweetheart”) picked Garner’s account of a murder trial, This House of Grief, for her enormously popular book club. Garner is “thrilled to bits” by all of this. “My street cred has gone through the roof!” she laughs.
When Monkey Grip was published in 1977, Australian critics were dismissive, even outraged, by its clear autobiographical inspirations. “Helen Garner has published her private journal rather than written a novel,” 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.
“Although it was true, I huffily defended myself against that claim, because it rests upon the idea that writing a diary is sloppy,” she says. “That 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’s attention. Now I’m happy to say that Monkey Grip was based on my diaries.”
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: “The fact that my diaries were flung into that big category called nonfiction – I thought, ‘Hooray! They found a home.’”
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 – her third and final. (She has been happily divorced ever since.)
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. “I will never be a great writer,” she writes in one entry. “The best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people’s gullets so that they remember them.” But she is also great company: observant and smart, able to find beauty in the smallest of moments. “Spring night: black sky speckled with stars, air cool and thickly scented with grass, and the odours of things growing.” And humour too: “At the hippies’ 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.” She puts words to even her strangest impulses; after seeing a peacock “preening like a Brazilian drag queen”, she fights “a powerful urge to run out there and sink the toe of my boot into his fluffy arse”.
Almost every reviewer has noted the ferocity of Garner’s anger on the page – towards husbands, bad friends, some children, complete strangers. “Anger is often very shameful for women,” Garner tells me. “I never feel surprised when I read about a woman murdering a man,” she adds, offering a glimpse of the writer who has haunted so many Australian courtrooms over the years. “I 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’t if we didn’t have to crush the anger and pretend it’s not happening.”
For Garner, writing a diary is an “intellectually and psychologically serious” exercise; she probes her own behaviour and thoughts, and tests the limits of her observation skills. They are also technically serious, “a sort of daily practice”, she says, for all of the books that were released around them.
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. “Back in the 70s, women writers were always criticised for being too narrow and, looking back, too personal. But people didn’t actually say that – we were ‘small canvas’. Everybody had to be writing four-generation family sagas. People don’t talk like that any more. And if they do, they don’t have any power.”
But by the 2010s, Garner was a national treasure at home. Her Australian publisher Text even put her shopping list online because so many readers said they would literally read anything she wrote. When publishing her diaries was first floated, Garner’s initial thought was, “There’s no way I’d do that.” She had actually destroyed her first diaries, burning a pile in her back yard in Fitzroy North in the 1980s: “I thought, these are really trashy, they’re boring and shit, so I’m going to burn them.”
But when she revisited the later diaries and realised they were interesting and written carefully, she set herself some rules: she would edit out “the boring stuff, the day’s residue”, but she would not rewrite entries. She contacted friends and family to warn them if they appeared. “Other people I did not consult because I thought they had it coming, to put it crudely,” she says. Names would be changed, she wrote, and if anyone wanted to see the entries they were in, they could: “I wasn’t exactly asking permission, but if somebody really, really didn’t want me to say something, I wouldn’t. But I was very happy that a lot of people wrote back and said, ‘I trust you.’ That was a wonderful moment for me.”
Garner likes her diaries more than anything else she has written. “I feel free when I’m writing in my diary. I’m not writing to please anybody else, I don’t have a deadline and I can say things in there that I wouldn’t say elsewhere.” Though, she adds, “There are things I don’t put in my diaries, now I’ve got the reputation for publishing them – I suppose some people must quake in their boots.”
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’s writing, are now all over 18. “My years of being a hands-on nanna are over, to my great sadness,” Garner says. “So my life is different and my diary is different.”
She is also noticing signs of cognitive decline. “I’m starting to forget a lot of things,” she says. Her mother died of Alzheimer’s at 82, and she worries about “cracking up”. Some words take longer to come. “But the most annoying thing is, I make spelling mistakes now,” she says. “I’m fanatical about spelling and punctuation. And now I flip back and think, ‘What is that word?’”
But she is still Helen Garner; even her own ageing is something to observe forensically. “I find it very interesting,” she muses. “I actually feel that I am old now. I’ll be 83 this week and I don’t know how much longer I’ve got.”Regardless of whether there are any more books in her, she will continue writing her diaries until the day she dies. “I can’t imagine finding life boring,” she says, with a small, satisfied smile. “The world around me is so interesting. There is always something to write about, so I’ll keep going.”