On a Garner Kick

Sunday Blog 270 - 12th April 2026

You can read the blog below, or have a listen, as you prefer.

“Are you going to read all that?” the young waitress asked as she laid down my cappuccino in a mug in front of me with a flourish. And not a drop spilled. “That’s so impressive!”

I caught her accolade deftly, but I was hurtling along on the crest of the wave of How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998 by Helen Garner. My Garner brick, I have been calling it. All 770 pages of it.

It was worth lugging it down to the cafe because I needed to hasten the end of her third marriage. It’s not suspense that carries me along. I know she has been free and happy for more than a quarter of a century. The way she has edited her diary entries takes me with her. I can see from her intimate account how easy it is to be entangled in a toxic relationship. To have been the frog who entered the sweet, tepid waters, about to be scalded alive.

I’m with her as she hangs on with the stubbornness of a partner who just wants their lying, cheating husband to tell the truth. With the pigheadedness of someone who doesn’t want to fail at marriage a third time. I just have to get to the end when she has finally, finally left him.

I pump my fist over and over in triumph at her delicious blue couch delivered to her, after she’s left, after she’s established herself in her independent accommodation.

Once the Garner brick is finished, more than two thirds polluted with mentions of the third husband, I’m onto reading reviews and articles. In this February 2026 Guardian interview, she comments on the third husband’s elliptical memoir, He, where she is despatched in just twelve lines. She found it funny. “I thought, OK, he put me in my place.”

And that’s why we love her.