'I revere Helen Garner's writing, and it's in her diaries that she's at her acute, rigorous, pitch-perfect best'
Nigella Lawson

'I come back again and again to Garner's diaries and always find something new to admire. Her wit and observations are brilliant and her thoughts on writing are a guide'
Daisy Johnson

'I love Helen Garner's diaries. I would read her grocery lists'
Fatima Bhutto

'The diaries are the apotheosis of Helen Garner's entire career, and the most exciting thing she has ever published . . . Beautiful, riveting, formally electrifying'
Lit Hub

Looking out the window at the two big gum trees, as it gets dark, I think: the only way I can go on keeping a diary - the bits about myself, anyway, i.e. most of it - is to conceive of it as a record of soul.
Helen Garner has kept a diary for most of her adult life. Now she is widely recognised as one of the greatest writers of our age. But, of all her books, it is her diaries that she likes best.

Collected for the first time into one volume, these inimitable diaries show Garner like never before: as a fledging author in bohemian Melbourne, publishing her lightning-rod debut novel while raising a young daughter in the 1970s; in the throes of an all-consuming love affair in the 1980s; and clinging to a disintegrating marriage in the 1990s.

How to End a Story reveals the inner life of a woman in love, a mother, a friend and a formidable writer at work. Told with devastating honesty, steel-sharp wit and an ecstatic attention to the details of everyday life, it offers all the satisfactions of a novel alongside the enthralling intimacy of something written in private and just for pleasure.

"Australia's greatest writer of nonfiction. How to End a Story concludes with one of the most candidly brutal accounts of the end of a creative marriage I've read" - Observer

"The diaries are the apotheosis of Helen Garner's entire career, and the most exciting thing she has ever published . . . Polished and spare, like the very short stories of Diane Williams and Lydia Davis . . . Beautiful, riveting, formally electrifying" - Literary Hub

"Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses" - New Yorker

"I was utterly in [Garner's] hands . . . . This is one for the introverts - the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status. Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest, and economical; take it or leave it, in the Australian manner" - New York Times Book Review

"On the page, Garner is uncommonly fierce, though this usually has the effect on me of making her seem all the more likable. I relish her fractious, contrarian streak - she wears it as a chef would a bloody apron" - Guardian

"Glittering shards of experience . . . How to End a Story places the Australian pioneer of autofiction firmly among the great chroniclers of daily life . . . Garner's always able to let the light in" - Financial Times