How to End a Story

Collected Diaries - Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize 2025
These expertly arranged diaries offer a window into the life and work of one of Australia's greatest living writers

'There are very few writers that I admire more than Helen Garner'
DAVID NICHOLLS

'The greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf's'
RACHEL COOKE, OBSERVER

'Marvellous, all eight hundred pages of it'
COLM TÓIBÍN

'The great Australian writer's masterpiece'
THE TIMES

Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Now she is widely recognised as one of the greatest writers of our age. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best.

Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.

How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LESLIE JAMISON

'Acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect'
NIGELLA LAWSON

'With sharp eyes and ears, Garner is a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses'
JAMES WOOD, NEW YORKER

'Dazzling, fearless greatness. I could not recommend this book more'
INDIA KNIGHT

'An acclaimed celebrator of the poetic quotidian'
ANNE ENRIGHT

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