Review: How to End a Story: Diaries: 1995–1998
Gaby Meares
Garner’s ability to see things, really see things, is extraordinary. Her observations about her surroundings, nature, the weather, relationships are always insightful and searingly honest.
In this third volume of her diaries, she reveals the disintegration of her marriage to V (who is, in fact, Murray Bail). I think I can say with confidence that most women will be able to relate to her struggles to retain her true self, at the same time as ‘keeping her man happy’. As women, we put up with so much bullsh*t don’t we?
These entries rang particularly true:
Letter about my book from a stranger, a woman in her forties: ‘My inability at times to protect myself, to establish my boundaries, to stand guardian at the gate of my own core, has possibly been the source of most of the pain I have experienced as a woman’
I wanted so much to be loved that I tried to turn myself into the sort of woman I thought I would have to be, in order to be loveable. In the process I falsified myself, lost part of my soul, made myself sick with swallowed rage.