Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Helen Garner, Text Publishing, $29.99.
Australian literary giant Helen Garner has invited readers to share her journey into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. She has opened her diaries. There was the first volume titled Yellow Notebook. The next one is One Day I’ll Remember This. It charts her life between 1987 and 1995.
The second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ends in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed. Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.
With crushing honesty and effervescent humour, she wrestles with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another ― how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising.
Through it all we see the elevating, and grounding power of work and the enduring value of friendship. There’s a lot in this chapter of her life as she works on screenplays, writes Cosmo Cosmolino, attends her first autopsy, gets tested for AIDS and receives her first fax.
It’s an uncommon format for writing, but is legible.
“What do you write in your diary?”
“Everything. I try to write all the worst things. That’s the hardest.
The temptation to gloss it up. I force myself to put down the bad
and stupid things I do, the idiotic fantasies I have.”
“And do you read back over it?”
“All the time.”
Sometimes single sentences speak volumes: “I want to write charmingly, using ‘I’ but without becoming grandiose.” Other times, it takes a couple more.
Helen has that extraordinary quality to upend the informal for its ability to unsettle and elucidate. The form maybe jagged, but not for long. Past occurrences, reflections if you will, are tweaked to communicate significant lived experiences.
