Book Review: ‘How to End a Story,’ by Helen Garner

[Pelican Press 0]

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Book Review: ‘How to End a Story,’ by Helen Garner

She is, in her telling, the kind of person who gets mistaken for the staff at book festivals. People walk up to her out of the blue and ask, “What’s the matter?” (This is a special hatred of mine, too.) She fears for her table manners. Photographers say things to her like, “Your profile, it is not the best.”

If you have ever looked at a photograph of yourself and were floored by your own unsightliness, well, Garner is a laureate of this experience:

He showed me some photos he’d taken of me last year and I was shocked by my ugliness: spotted skin, lined face, ugly haircut, dark expressions. I mean I was shocked. I quailed at the possibility that I will be alone now for the rest of my life.

Her sense of unworthiness extends to her own writing. “I’m just a middle-level craftswoman,” she writes. And: “Grief is not too strong a word for what one feels before one’s own weakness and mediocrity.” She battles nuclear-grade levels of impostor syndrome.

Writers have kept diaries for myriad reasons. Anaïs Nin wished to taste life twice. Patricia Highsmith longed to clarify “items that might otherwise drift in my head.” Anne Frank wanted to go on living after her death. Sheila Heti felt that if she didn’t look at her life closely she was abandoning an important task.

These are Garner’s instincts, too. But she also says, charmingly: “Why do I write down this stuff? Partly for the pleasure of seeing the golden nib roll over the paper as it did when I was 10.” This writing served a more serious purpose. Garner told

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: “The diaries are how I turned myself into a writer — there’s my 10,000 hours.”

The quotidian details of life shine in this book — her pot plants, shopping trips (“Kmart, fount of all goodness”), dinner parties, washing her knickers in a bucket, defleaing a dog, mending a skirt, going to the movies, keeping a copy of “Paradise Lost” in the outdoor bathroom. Sometimes she lives in small urban apartments, and at others in a rural house where she sees koalas and kangaroos and eagles and kookaburras.

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