Awards

• Long-listed for Baillie Gifford Prize 2025 (UK)
• Winner of Baillie Gifford Prize 2025 (UK)

Overview

Helen Garner’s acclaimed three volumes of diaries are collected here in one sumptuous book. Spanning two decades—from the publication of her lightning-rod debut novel in the late 70s, to the throes of a consuming affair in the late 80s, and the messiness and pain of a disintegrating marriage in the late 90s—the diaries reveal the life of one of the world’s greatest writers. Devastatingly honest and disarmingly funny, How to End a Story is a portrait of loss, betrayal, and the sheer force of a woman’s anger—but also of hard work and resilience, moments of hope and joy, the immutable ties of motherhood, and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.

Full Product Details

9781923058101

Table of Contents

Reviews

‘The real value of this collection is the opportunity it affords us to see the domestic, ordinary, everyday world through Garner’s eyes.’ * Washington Post * ‘I revere Helen Garner’s writing, and it’s in her diaries that she’s at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best.’ * Nigella Lawson * ‘What a wonderful writer. Her prose is spare and beautiful, her stories are truthful and touching. There are very few writers that I admire more.’ * David Nicholls * ‘A voice of great honesty and energy.’ * Anne Enright * ‘Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest, and economical.’ * New York Times Book Review * ‘Garner’s honesty and her refusal to take things at face value, even when she cannot see what’s right before her eyes, give her work enormous power…Even if you already know her work, I think you’ll devour the diaries.’ * Washington Independent Review of Books * ‘Very well might be the finest literary diaries since Virginia Woolf’s…Told with devastating honestly, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, How to End a Story offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.’ * Daunt Books [UK] *

‘The real value of this collection is the opportunity it affords us to see the domestic, ordinary, everyday world through Garner’s eyes.’ * Washington Post * ‘I revere Helen Garner’s writing, and it’s in her diaries that she’s at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best.’ * Nigella Lawson * ‘What a wonderful writer. Her prose is spare and beautiful...There are very few writers that I admire more.’ * David Nicholls * ‘A voice of great honesty and energy.’ * Anne Enright * ‘Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest, and economical.’ * New York Times Book Review * ‘Garner’s honesty and her refusal to take things at face value, even when she cannot see what’s right before her eyes, give her work enormous power…Even if you already know her work, I think you’ll devour the diaries.’ * Washington Independent Review of Books * ‘Very well might be the finest literary diaries since Virginia Woolf’s…Told with devastating honestly, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, How to End a Story offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.’ * Daunt Books [UK] *

‘The real value of this collection is the opportunity it affords us to see the domestic, ordinary, everyday world through Garner’s eyes.’ * Washington Post * ‘This diary begins by registering what is ordinary, how days are, what it is like to be a writer, a daughter, a mother, a lover, a citizen of Melbourne.’ * Colm Tóibín * ‘I revere Helen Garner’s writing, and it’s in her diaries that she’s at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best.’ * Nigella Lawson * ‘What a wonderful writer. Her prose is spare and beautiful...There are very few writers that I admire more.’ * David Nicholls * ‘A voice of great honesty and energy.’ * Anne Enright * ‘Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest, and economical.’ * New York Times Book Review * ‘Garner’s honesty and her refusal to take things at face value, even when she cannot see what’s right before her eyes, give her work enormous power…Even if you already know her work, I think you’ll devour the diaries.’ * Washington Independent Review of Books * ‘Very well might be the finest literary diaries since Virginia Woolf’s…Told with devastating honestly, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, How to End a Story offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.’ * Daunt Books [UK] * ‘These three volumes of Garner’s diaries, which span from 1978 to 1998, shows the Australian writer grappling with the vicissitudes of daily life: aging, big loves, creative and professional elations and frustrations, housekeeping, literary world rivalries, everyday fashion, thorny friendships, and making art. She thinks better than almost anyone.’ * W Magazine * ‘A devastating and engrossing portrait of passion, artistic conundrums, motherhood, rage, resignation... leaves you drunk with awe.’ * Maria Semple * ‘Every single page contains a passage of such distilled acuity and brilliance, it leaves you half drunk with exhilaration . . . These are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s.’ * Rachel Cooke, Observer * ‘The great Australian writer’s masterpiece . . . As propulsive and thrilling as any domestic noir.’ * The Times * ‘With sharp eyes and ears, Garner is a recording angel at life’s secular apocalypses.’ * James Wood, New Yorker * ‘Entrancing. I will return to these diaries for the rest of my days.’ * Charlotte Wood *

Author Information

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Windham Campbell Prize for Non-Fiction, the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation, The Spare Room, This House of Grief, The Season, How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, which won the prestigious Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and The Mushroom Tapes, with Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein.

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