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.

I felt like a voyeur as I read Garner’s diaries. How brave she is to expose herself to us, her readers. She hasn’t censored her entries, even her climbing of Uluru remains. (Here’s a link to an interview with HG explaining her choice not to censor. https://www.smh.com.au/culture/books/i-didn-t-censor-helen-garner-s-unflinching-look-at-her-past-self-20191104-p5377s.html)

My copy is thick with book darts marking the passages that I wish to quote; too many! She is kind and mean; gossipy and snippy and needy, but also generous and loving. She is spiteful. She is funny. She is honest. She constantly struggles with feelings of failure and mediocrity. This is a book to savour and return to again and again. It is delicious.

Here are my favourite quotes:

*How we fight, tooth and nail, against real insight. Against letting go of what makes us suffer.
Why I like the English language: because it contains words like cup. Fat, short and stumpy, and rather optimistic.
…we don’t want to fight. So we do what women do: we fade away.
*I couldn’t help agonising over it, thinking of the smallness of my scope, the ordinariness of it, its bourgeois nature. What critics will say. What my friends will think and not say. How I will appear before the world. Oh shut up.
*M [Garner’s daughter] has her school friend over for the night. Together they enter an element quite separate from ordinary life - male and female characters, invested accents, vast fantasies, paroxysms of malicious laughter. There’s something terrifying about them.
*Young male photographer: ‘Come on. big smile. Love those big smiles.’ ‘Please don’t tell me to smile.’ ‘You look starched.’ ‘I am starched. I am a starched person.’
*The only passionate love that can co-exist with civilised daily working life is the love we have for our children. The other sort either loses its madness and becomes something else, or blows everything sky-high.
*It is perhaps always hard to find a person who will play out a drama with you right to the end, and not stroll off the stage before the killing starts.
*Maybe a marriage can get up again and walk, after a terrible beating.
*He’ll be like the Russians: he’ll retreat and retreat and retreat until I freeze to death.
*I need to find out why I so often get myself into situations where people have to symbolically murder me.

I love Helen Garner.
Her insight and generosity make her writing a joy to read. Some of these pieces are familiar from her newspaper columns, but well worth revisiting, like an old friend. Others were new to me so, to follow my analogy, like making a new friend!