‘I’m never surprised when I read about a woman killing a man’: Helen Garner in her Baillie Gifford award-winning memoir | books

WWhen Helen Garner was announced as the winner of the Baillie Gifford Nonfiction Prize in London on Tuesday evening, the 82-year-old Australian author had traveled 16,000 kilometres. Far away in Melbourne, she’s watching the concert via live stream at home on Wednesday morning. When the decisive moment came, I heard “The winner is…” – and then the broadcast froze. “We were going, ‘Oh my God!’ “Running. We didn’t know what to do. The timing was like something in a comedy.” Congratulations came immediately, and that’s how she learned she had won the £50,000 ($A100,000) prize for How to End a Story, an 800-page collection of her startlingly candid diaries, which she kept between 1978 and 1998.

Garner is still grappling with her win when we speak a few hours later. “I’m a stunned mullet,” she says as she sits in her office, wrapped in a purple shawl and glasses tied with a rope around her neck. “I didn’t think I had a chance.” She had absolutely no idea what she said in her thank you speech: “I think I’m in shock.”

In her 80s, Garner is experiencing career highs. After decades of being ignored abroad, Australia’s Joan Didion is great. Carrie Bradshaw recently handed out a hardback copy of Garner’s debut novel Monkey Grip in an episode of And Just Like That, as if it were a must-have purse, while Dua Lipa (“Perfect Sweetheart”) chose Garner’s novel about a murder trial, This House of Sorrow, for her wildly popular book club. Garner is “thrilled” with all of this. “My street credibility is through the roof!” She laughs.

When Monkey Grip was published in 1977, Australian critics were dismissive, even angry, because of its obvious autobiographical inspiration. “Helen Garner has published her own memoirs instead of writing a novel,” one sniffed. It was a charge that was difficult for Garner to deny, after she spent months drawing from her diaries to write the love story between a divorced single mother and a heroin addict in Melbourne.

“Although that was true, I defended myself vigorously against that claim, because it was based on the idea that writing a memoir is sloppy,” she says. “It’s just a muddy stream of feminine grumbling that comes out of a woman and she writes it down and calls it a book. I got very angry at the suggestion that memoirs were sloppy and unworthy of people’s attention. Now I’m happy to say that Monkey Grip was based on my memoirs.”

Nearly 50 years later, she has won acclaim and awards for publishing her actual memoir. She loves that How to End a Story has won an award for nonfiction, a term usually reserved for greatest history: “The fact that my memoir was placed in a big category called nonfiction — I thought, ‘Hey! “They have found a home.”

How to End a Story is a three-volume book that begins after the birth of her daughter Alice (M in the diary) and her divorce from her first husband, Bill Garner. The first part (1978-1987) begins immediately after the publication of Monkey Grip, and charts the collapse of her second marriage to the Frenchman Jean-Jacques Portel. The second (1987-1995) finds her beginning an affair with (married) Australian novelist Murray Bell, while the third (1995-1998) charts the end of their marriage – their third and final. (She has since been happily divorced.)

In the diary, Garner seems very far from the grande dame of today. She is stressed and tearful, desperate for praise and very critical of herself. “I will never be a great writer,” she wrote in one essay. “The best I can do is write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people’s guts so they’ll remember them.” But she’s also great company: committed and intelligent, able to find beauty in the smallest moments. “Spring night: black starry sky, the air cool and thickly scented with grass, the smells of things growing.” And humor, too: “At a hippie’s house for dinner, I find in my slice of quiche two foreign items: a dead match and my pubic hair. I hide them under a lettuce leaf and we keep talking.” She puts words to even her strangest urges. After seeing the peacock “preening like a Brazilian drag queen,” she fights “a strong urge to run over there and plunge the toe of my shoe into his delicate ass.”

Almost every reviewer has noted the ferocity of Garner’s anger on the page—at husbands, bad boyfriends, some children, and complete strangers. “Anger is often very shameful for women,” Garner tells me. “I’m never surprised when I read about a woman killing a man,” she adds, providing a profile of the author who has haunted many Australian courtrooms over the years. “I noticed and understood how much we have to deal with in order to live a peaceful life. Sometimes, a woman explodes. I think they wouldn’t do that if we didn’t have to squash the anger and pretend it’s not happening.”

For Garner, writing a memoir is an “intellectually and psychologically dangerous” exercise. She explores her behavior and thoughts, and tests the limits of her observation skills. She’s also artistically serious, and says it’s “kind of a daily practice” for all the books that come out about her.

For years, her novels were viewed as too local to be relevant, while her nonfiction showed too much of her personality to be objective. She’s sure a lot of this was sexism. “In the 1970s, women writers were always criticized for being too narrow and, looking back, too personal. But people wouldn’t actually say that – we were a ‘tiny canvas’. Everyone had to write four-generation family sagas. People don’t talk that way anymore. And if they did, they wouldn’t have any power.”

But by 2010, Garner was a national treasure at home. Her Australian publisher, Text, even put her online shopping list because so many readers said they would read literally anything she wrote. When her memoir was first published, Garner’s initial thought was: “There’s no way I’m going to do that.” She had already destroyed her first memoir, burning a pile in the backyard of her Fitzroy North home in the 1980s: “I thought this was really trashy, it’s boring and dirty, so I’ll burn it.”

But when she later revisited the diary and realized that it was interesting and carefully written, she set some rules for herself: she would delete “boring things, leftovers of the day,” but she would not rewrite the entries. She called her friends and family to warn them in case they showed up. “I didn’t consult other people because I thought they would come, to put it crudely,” she says. She wrote that the names would be changed, and if anyone wanted to see the entries they were in, they could: “I wasn’t exactly asking for permission, but if someone really didn’t want me to say something, I wouldn’t do it. But I was so happy that so many people responded to me and said, ‘I trust you.’ That was a great moment for me.”

Garner loves her memoirs more than anything else she’s written. “I feel free when I write in my diary. I don’t write to please anyone else, I don’t have a deadline and I can say things in it that I wouldn’t say anywhere else.” However, she adds: “There are things I don’t put in my diaries, and now I’ve gained a reputation for publishing them – I think some people must be shaking in their boots.”

She still keeps her diary today, scribbling it with a pen while sitting in bed first thing in the morning or last thing at night. Her subjects have changed since her last published volume: her three grandchildren, who have lived next door all their lives and make many interesting cameos in Garner’s writing, are now over 18. “My years as a nanny were over, which made me very sad,” Garner says. “So my life is different and my memoirs are different.”

They also notice signs of cognitive decline. “I started to forget a lot of things,” she says. Her mother died of Alzheimer’s disease at age 82, and she worries about “collapse.” Some words take longer to come. “But the most annoying thing is that I make spelling mistakes now,” she says. “I’m fanatical about spelling and punctuation. Now I step back and think: ‘What is it?’ Which word?'”

But she’s still Helen Garner. Even her old age is something to be noted forensically. “I find it very interesting,” she muses. “I actually feel old now. I’ll be 83 this week and I don’t know how much time I have left.” Regardless of whether she has any more books, she will continue to write her memoirs until the day she dies. “I can’t imagine life being boring,” she says with a small, satisfied smile. “The world around me is very interesting. There is always something to write about, so I will keep going.”