All my old diaries

‘Yesterday I felt like burning all my old diaries. I spoke about it to two people, a writer and a photographer. Each replied to this effect: “You’ll be the same person, with the same past, whether you burn them or not.” ’ This is Helen Garner - perhaps one of the most significant diarists in Australian literary history - who was recently awarded the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. Now in her 80s, she came to literary attention half a century ago with her first novel, Monkey Grip, notable for its diary-like immediacy, emotional candour and refusal to tidy experience into conventional plot.

Garner,  née Ford, was born in Geelong, Victoria, in 1942 and grew up in provincial towns across the state, an upbringing that later informed her alert, unsentimental attention to social detail. She studied arts at the University of Melbourne and worked as a secondary-school teacher, until her dismissal that is, in 1972, after distributing a frank sex-education questionnaire to students. She emerged in the mid-1970s with a distinctive voice, aligned loosely with feminist and countercultural circles but resistant to doctrinal positions. Her first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), drew directly on Melbourne share-house life and heroin culture. From the outset, her work blurred boundaries between fiction, memoir and reportage, but offered close observation and the authority of lived experience.

Across subsequent decades Garner produced novels, short stories, essays and works of nonfiction that steadily consolidated her reputation as one of Australia’s most exacting moral writers. Books such as The Children’s Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief examine intimate relationships, violence, grief and justice with a style marked by restraint, scepticism and ethical seriousness. She has often attracted controversy, particularly when writing about real criminal cases, but her method remains consistent: attention to concrete detail, an insistence on complexity, and a refusal to offer comfort where none is earned. She was married three times, and had a daughter with her first husband Bill Garner. Further biographical information is available from Wikipedia, 

Garner’s diaries have appeared selectively and retrospectively rather than as continuous life-records. The Yellow Notebook (1978) first introduced her journal voice in a brief, experimental form, closely aligned with her early fiction. Four decades later, in 2019, she returned to the material in The Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978-1987, an extensively edited selection spanning a decade. A second volume, One Day I’ll Remember This (2020), draws from later notebooks and is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. 

Then in 2023, she published How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998, which is said to be darker and more inward, preoccupied with exhaustion, doubt and the ethics of continuing to write at all. The three volumes were first published in Australia by Text Publishing, and most recently brought together in a collected edition titled How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998. The UK edition of this won the 2025 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction last November (see also The Guardian) - the first time it has been awarded to a diary collection. Reviews of Garner’s published diaries can be read at The Guardian and Washington Independent Review of Books.

Here are several extracts from The Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I (which can be sampled at Googlebooks). NB: as far as I can tell, none of Garner’s published diary extracts are identified by date (other than the year).

1978

‘I think all the time about the thing I’m supposed to be writing, that I’ve got a grant to be writing. I’ve found a library to work in. Rue Pavée. If I write what I want to, about the people I know at home, I’ll never be able to live in Melbourne again. About the woman who always sang in a register too high for her voice, and that wasn’t the worst of it. Lazy, charming G in his band, all the girls hanging round him waiting to be fucked. I don’t even do the dishes or cook. I change the position of my bed. I buy huge sheets of drawing paper, pin them to the bedroom wall, cover them with diagrams of characters and their inter-relating. I play the High Rise Bombers tape full-blast and dance by myself, jumping high in the air. Then I crash into appalling bouts of self-doubt, revulsion at my past behaviour, loathing for my emotional habits and the fact that I still feel the need to expose, thinly disguised or barely metamorphosed, my own experience. In the metro this morning, on my way to the library, I felt grey and shrivelled, watching the tunnel lights slip past in their rhythm, wishing that I spoke French twice as well as I do and had a real job with people I didn’t particularly like, so I wouldn’t have to produce my own raison d’être every day, like a spider yanking thread out of its own guts, or wherever the hell they pull it from.

1979

‘I’ve found a workroom I can rent, over a dress shop in Moonee Ponds. It looks north towards a low mountain very far away. In a corner, a hand basin. Its drain is clogged and it’s full of old brown water. Maybe mozzies will breed in it. I don’t care. I’m writing three sentences a day. Wretched, ill-tempered, nervous, unbearable. Maybe I’m a one-book woman.’

1980

‘Yesterday I felt like burning all my old diaries. I spoke about it to two people, a writer and a photographer. Each replied to this effect: ‘You’ll be the same person, with the same past, whether you burn them or not.’ I decided not to burn anything, but to pack them up and store them somewhere where I can’t get at them.’

1981

‘B and I rode to the Fitzroy Gardens to watch the wedding parties having their photos taken. We leaned on our bikes for a long time, half hidden by vegetation, greedy for detail. Flashes of colour behind shrubbery. In the distance, great heavy elms with dark trunks, and at their base a tiny froth of white: a hurrying bride. The young Italian and Greek men wear their silly top-hats shoved to the back of the head, ears sticking out of thick hair, like louts from Eton. The Australian bride runs her day with an iron fist: her harsh, humourless voice giving orders. Australians have no sense of occasion. They stand about with shy faces that look mean. The Mediterraneans dress with unselfconscious flamboyance and play their roles with gusto.’