how to end a story helen garner

Book review: How to end a story, Helen Garner

Writing and Publishing

“How To End A Story is pleasing to the reader precisely because of its courage.’ Photo by Darren James.

Isn’t it wonderful, I think to myself, how a slight woman in the inner city suburbs of Melbourne, first derided by critics when she made her debut, has ended up anticipating the biggest literary trend of the 21st century? 

Helen Garner is a writer, a journalist, and a national treasure. Yet when her first novel Monkey Grip was published in 1977, she was patronised by an establishment hostile to the intimacy of first-person writing. The crime writer Peter Corris wrote that ‘Helen Garner had published her private journal rather than a novel.’ This charge, levelled cynically, has its own counter-intuitive genius. Decades later, in the essay anthology Everywhere I Look , in columns in The Monthly , and finally in a series of three volumes, the most recent of which, How To End A Story , has just been published, Garner steered into the skid and began publishing a version of her diaries. The results have the poignancy, the detail, and the generosity of Garner’s best writing. 

How To End A Story: Diaries: 1995–1998 , taps into a vein of autofiction that has become popular on a global scale. Starting with Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Proustian lament for the fractured lives of writers, the My Struggle sequence, autofiction is a kind of overblown myth of the Everyman that tells us something profound about our narcissistic age. The comedy of self-deprecation and defeat, the frustration of deeply held desires, and the grand narratives of success are the bread and butter of stories that read like fragments from a life. If Garner has dressed the work she has been doing for decades in the clothes of these current fashions, it is not with an eye to literary greatness but an eye for detail, for the pearls and poignancy of every day life. 

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Helen Garner’s diaries and How To End A Story , its most dramatic volume, are in some ways similar and some ways different to Garner’s non-fiction. Where in Joe Cinque’s Consolation or This House of Grief , the ‘I’ that describes is performative, dramatising her own understanding of events as they pass and tend towards terrible tragedy, the ‘I’ in Garner’s diaries is genuine, a magpie scavenging for skerricks of pleasure. If the non-fiction recalls the late journalist Janet Malcolm, whose crime reportage like Iphigenia in Forest Hills has been an influence on Garner, then the autofiction follows in the tradition of 17th-century diarist Samuel Pepys who writes, like Garner, out of a debt to pleasure. 

How To End A Story is pleasing to the reader precisely because of its courage. By this third volume in Garner’s diaries, the code she uses to offer privacy to the subjects of her diaries begins to become identifiable: we are witnessing the dissolution of her third marriage, to the writer Murray Bail. Like Knausgaard’s trilogy, it shares the perils of being married to a writer, and also, in some ways, an opposite personality, and a member of the opposite sex: he is theoretical, she is emotional. He thinks only of work while she longs for more. 

Garner’s autofiction provides all the guts, glamour and goodness of the fiction that made her name. Its publication proves that the value of writing is firstly, for oneself.

How To End A Story: Diaries: 1995–1998 , Helen Garner Publisher: Text Publishing ISBN: 9781922458179 Format: Hardback Pages: 256pp RRP $29.99 Published: November 2021

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Vanessa Francesca

Vanessa Francesca is a writer who has worked in independent theatre. Her work has appeared in The Age, The Australian and Meanjin

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How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998  by Helen Garner

Text Publishing, $29.99 hb, 248 pp

T he first two volumes of Helen Garner’s diaries – Yellow Notebook (2019) and One Day I’ll Remember This (2020) – cover eight years apiece. This one covers three. It is an intense, even claustrophobic story of the breakup of a marriage – a story told in the incidental, fragmentary form of a diary.

In an earlier volume, Garner wrote: ‘I would like to write about dominance, revulsion, separation, the horrible struggles between people who love each other.’ And, ‘Later, a dream: some kind of dark, dumb attraction between V and me.’ Now here it is: a story of the struggles between people who love each other, and their slow waking out of it. How to End a Story starts just after the publication of Garner’s book The First Stone (1995), a book that she started writing at about the time that she started on the relationship with V. A lot of the entries in How to End a Story reflect, one way or another, on ‘the trouble between women and men’. Even seemingly digressive parts of the diary reflect back on the question. She and a friend visit the new Armani store: they compare its clothes for women with its clothes for men. They prefer the latter. She is told that her haircut is ‘too short’; she calls it ‘blokeish’. Her daughter gets married; she remembers how her father thwarted her first wedding. She visits her parents: when her father leaves the room, he turns out the light, leaving his wife and daughter in the dark. She and V pass a couple fighting in the street. Passing that place the next day, V says, ‘I wonder what happened to that bloke.’ She quotes Proust on jealousy; Richard Ford from Women with Men .

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• Helen Garner

Lisa Gorton

• Text Publishing

Lisa Gorton, who lives in Melbourne, is a poet, novelist, and critic, and a former Poetry Editor of ABR . She studied at the Universities of Melbourne and Oxford. A Rhodes Scholar, she completed a Masters in Renaissance Literature and a Doctorate on John Donne at Oxford University, and was awarded the John Donne Society Award for Distinguished Publication in Donne Studies. Her first poetry collection, Press Release (2007), won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Poetry. She has also been awarded the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize. A second poetry collection followed in 2013: Hotel Hyperion (also Giramondo). Lisa has also written a children’s novel, Cloudland (2008). Her novel The Life of Houses (2015) shared the 2016 Prime Minister’s Award for fiction. She is the editor of The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.).

How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998

by Helen Garner

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Comment (1).

• Thank you for this, Lisa. All the things there but over Garner's shoulder or under the desk were coming to me as I read it. Was driven to read Badiou: 'In Le Dépeupleur, or The Lost One, the place is a giant rubber cylinder where the variations of light, sound, and temperature are regulated by rigorous laws that are empirically observable and yet conceptually unknown. A simple cosmos, purified, reduced to the complex of closure and legality.' I'm struck by how we're living in a world in denial of the conceptual laws we nevertheless must endure. Posted by Paul Voermans 31 December 2021

How to End a Story: Diaries 1995–1998

Diaries, book three, helen garner.

• award Shortlisted, Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, NSW Premier's Literary Awards, 2023
• award Shortlisted, National Biography Award, 2023

Helen Garner’s third volume of diaries is an account of a woman fighting to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her.

Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship – and the truth of her own self.

This is a harrowing story, a portrait of the messy, painful, dark side of love lost, of betrayal and sadness and the sheer force of a woman’s anger. But it is also a story of resilience and strength, strewn with sharp insight, moments of joy and hope, the immutable ties of motherhood and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.

INTERVIEWS and REVIEWS ABC Radio Melbourne: Songs and Stories      ABC Radio National: Life Matters      Australian Book Review     Australian Book Review podcast     Chat 10 Looks 3       Cheltenham Literary Festival: Helen Garner in conversation with Beejay Silcox      First Time podcast      Guardian : I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote     Guardian : The 25 best Australian books of 2021      Happy Mag : Best New Books      InDaily     InDaily : Eight of the best: the year in books       Kill Your Darlings : Books Roundup       Law Society Journal     Monthly : Lockdown Diaries ($)     Monthly : Both Barrels ($)    Overland     

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime...

‘The ordinary in these diaries—the daily, the diurnal, the stumbled-upon, the breathing in and out—is turned into something else through the writer’s extraordinary craft.’

‘Helen Garner is one of the lords of language in our midst and something more. She has a poet’s ear, a painter’s eye and she understands profoundly and without self-pity the mystery of the tears in things.’

‘The spirituality of these diaries is worth a library of high-minded theology…Their acuity is ultimately healing. You will leave with the impression that you have not so much been looking at Garner’s life as at life itself.’

‘Candid and flawless, as we’ve come to expect from Garner.’

‘A tremendous feat [with] a bloodcurdling credibility… How to End a Story is further evidence that Garner is a diarist of genius and the intimacies and intensities will long outlast the sorrows that engendered them. It is a book of wisdom in the face of every folly.’

‘The true gratifications of How to End a Story exist in a woman’s slow, tentative unfurling in the wake of a relationship’s collapse.’

‘A devastating yet enlightening look in to the private thoughts and feelings of an incredible woman. It is a privilege to read.’

‘Compellingly propulsive…While this volume is rich in small human moments and intimate reflections on being a writer…the central drama gives How to End a Story the quality of a novel.’

‘Brilliant.’

‘As propulsive as the most addictive page-turner and as exquisitely rendered as [Garner’s] novels and short stories…Garner’s diaries are expertly paced and arranged, as much outward-looking as inward, and as attuned to the quotidian as to the profound.’

‘Garner is often lauded for her unflinching gaze and unsparing prose. But in this latest volume of her diaries her command of concealment is a masterclass.’

‘A shockingly relatable account of a woman trying to chip out a space to live and work…No-one today would question Garner’s significance, her intellectual heft, her bankability or her right to the prodigious space she occupies in Australian letters…A monumental achievement.’

‘ How to End a Story is a plunge into the abyss as the artist and the woman desperately tries to keep her marriage, her sanity and her artistic vision alive…Few Australian writers are as cherished as Helen Garner.’

‘The most formidable book of excerpts from [Garner’s] diaries so far, a devastating portrait of the breakdown of a marriage and not least of the narrator: a staggering achievement.’

‘An inspiring and thought-provoking collection that runs the gamut of human emotion.’

‘Garner’s passion, clarity, forensic observation and humour are well in evidence.’

‘The first two volumes of Garner’s diaries offer, as one of their chief pleasures, the feeling of time as it passes. They are full of small occasions, glancing insights, a slowly accumulating drift of actions and consequences. This one is different. This one is as compelling as a detective story. This one is edited with the sense of an ending….At times, reading this diary, you feel like a spy. At times you feel like a friend. At times you feel like a judge.’

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How to End a Story

• Diaries 1995-1998

By: Helen Garner

• Narrated by: Helen Garner
• Length: 8 hrs
• 5.0 out of 5 stars 5.0 (3 ratings)

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Yellow Notebook

• Diaries Volume I 1978-1987
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Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard. Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I spans a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip .

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Publisher's summary

Helen Garner’s third volume of diaries is an account of a woman fighting to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her.

Living with a powerfully ambitious writer who is consumed by his work and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines. At the same time, she is desperate to find the truth in their relationship - and the truth of her own self.

This is a harrowing story, a portrait of the messy, painful, dark side of love lost, of betrayal and sadness and the sheer force of a woman’s anger. But it is also a story of resilience and strength, strewn with sharp insight, moments of joy and hope, the immutable ties of motherhood and the regenerative power of a room of one’s own.

• Unabridged Audiobook
• Categories: Biographies & Memoirs

Critic reviews

"The ordinary in these diaries - the daily, the diurnal, the stumbled-upon, the breathing in and out - is turned into something else through the writer’s extraordinary craft." ( Australian Book Review )

"Helen Garner is one of the lords of language in our midst and something more." ( The Australian )

"The spirituality of these diaries is worth a library of high-minded theology." ( Sydney Morning Herald )

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What listeners say about How to End a Story

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• Overall 5 out of 5 stars
• Performance 5 out of 5 stars
• Story 5 out of 5 stars

• Ruth Bourchier

A riveting listen

Listening to the three parts of these diaries (d’affilé), I was struck by their honesty and authenticity.

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• Anonymous User

An absolute privilege

Thank you Helen for sharing so much with such eloquence. I’m going to read everything you’ve written!

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How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998

Authors: Helen Garner Publisher: Text Publishing

When Helen Garner published her first novel Monkey Grip in the 1970s, the literary establishment of the day patronised what it saw as a regurgitation of her own private journal. It wasn’t that; but the abrupt emotion and hyper-detailed scrutiny of people and situations was clearly rooted in real life experiences. It kicked off a unique vein of first-person autofiction that has earned Garner a cult-like following today. Namely: her unmatched ability to draw extraordinary poignancy from reflections on apparently ordinary people and events.

Five novels, 11 non-fiction works, three autobiographies and about as many literary awards carry Garner’s by-line alongside an illustrious career as a journalist and court reporter. How to End a Story is Garner’s third volume of published diaries, recounting the excruciating final years of her third marriage breakdown, between 1995-1998. You don’t need to have read her previous recounts, but they provide useful context for this third, standalone act.

Her husband, who she refers to as “V” throughout the book (his identity is easily discoverable via Google), is a prominent Australian writer who has become completely absorbed in finishing his latest novel. No distractions may get in his way – not necessary house repairs, family members hoping to visit, or even Garner herself (she must leave their shared flat through the daylight hours to avoid disturbing his flow). Obvious tensions over the flat, the novel, and their disintegrating connection bubble over at various points. The insidious undercurrent is more compelling: is there another woman?

Ending a story hurts; but the fear and madness resulting from being gaslighted into it can be a lot worse. Garner articulates the complex, gritty and mind-bending rollercoaster of suspecting she is being betrayed, while railing to keep up the façade in her regular life. The universality of this struggle makes her latest work yet another page-turner.

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Myth–archetype–story–f[r]iction: Helen Garner’s How to End a Story

The third volume of Helen Garner’s diaries, How To End a Story , is a reminder of how affecting books, or art and culture more widely, are. This is art, as Elizabeth Grosz writes via Gilles Deleuze, as an ‘enhancement or intensification of bodies’, an ‘elaboration of sensations.’

This third diary is also disturbing and difficult to read. The marriage of Helen (H, HG) and V (writer Murray Bail), her third and his second respectively, combusts in a blistering conflagration. This bonfire in the heart of the diary is wearying. Garner is constantly antagonistic towards Bail, writing untempered negative representations of him. This antagonism is despite her reaction to an essay in Bodyjamming, about The First Stone , as ‘a malicious personal attack on me … the sort of character-destroying lies one could sue about.’

This volume of the diaries came out during a minor conflagration on Twitter about autofiction, creative nonfiction and plagiarism bound up with two short stories ‘Cat Person’ and ‘The Kindest’, the content of which two other writers claimed to have been ‘stolen’ from their real lives, and the ubiquity of the terms ‘gaslighting’ and ‘cancel culture’ about public naming and shaming. Helen here is a vengeful Valkyrie, as histrionic as I imagine a Wagnerian opera to be. In the climax of the volume, Helen goes ‘berserk’ (her term) in the kitchen, V’s work room and their bedroom.

Soup, coffee cups, butter all over the cupboard front … I get from the bedroom the Armani scarf he gave me … and cut it into pieces … and pour a bottle of ink on top of it … I wrench the cap off his Mont Blanc fountain pen and stab the proof [of his fucking novel] with the nib, gripping the pen in my fist the like a dagger. I stab and stab, I press and screw and grind.

This berserking may have been a fiction, a desire incarnated in the diaries, akin to my hallucinatory experience in the National Library of Australia while working on Bail’s correspondence in his archives: I had a stray thought that the letters to him about Eucalyptus by male fan readers were in fact a Bail-created fiction, so much were their writers like Holland and Mr Cave in the novel—and indeed any other fixated, narrowly minded white Anglo-Saxon male in a Bail novel.   

Opera, as a trope, came to mind for a few reasons. Bernadette Brennan likened the narrative of Joe Cinque’s Consolation to arias performed in eighteenth-century opera. In Garner’s ‘Recording Angel’, one of two stories preceding her novel Cosmo Cosmolino , Wagner is mentioned:

Soon after the collapse of my last attempt at marriage, when it did not appear to matter much which city I was in, I passed through Sydney and called … on my old friend Patrick, to tell him … my Auntie Dot had died … ‘Her hairdos,’ I said, ‘were Wagnerian.’

This quote is telling for more than its reference to opera: it displays Garner’s highly personal bent in fiction. Her first two marriages did not last, and her ‘old friend’ is based on Axel Clark (see Brennan). The story caused a fallout between Garner and another friend, most probably Axel’s wife Alison (R), mentioned in the second diary.

… V reports a conversation with R. ‘I told her that everybody … wrote about real people’. She said, “Yes, but he [Axel Clark] finds it hard, out there in the open.” I asked her about you … She said it was part of her growing up—she felt she had to move on.’

Bail’s self-portrait He . also engaged with opera. The narrator of He. —who is not named but is Bail, or a version of him—is said to be impressed by a performance of Wagner’s Meistersinger to which his first wife, a rational version of a woman scorned, took him, for his birthday, after they separated. Wagner became the composer Bail concentrated on. Formerly, he had shunned opera because it was ‘antique and exaggerated’. In her third diary, Garner records attending opera three times, and there are mentions in the other diaries. (My own experience of ‘traditional’ opera, as audience member and usherette, was as an abnormality: I was beleaguered intellectually by the cast singing the plot. But I came to understand it more through contemporary opera, such as Nixon in China .)

Garner’s three diaries do form a three-act staging. Helen meets V in the penultimate year of the first volume. Her contemplation of him opens the second volume, which also reveals early tensions in the relationship and marriage.

To read the third diary as fiction is less heartbreaking, the main characters being H and V. However, although in interviews about the volume both Garner and her interviewers refer only to V, in an interview with Nicole Abadee , Garner (inadvertently?) says ‘Murray’.

Garner did subtitle the third diary How To End a Story , with the implication that ‘story’ means fiction, but she has also titled a collection of creative nonfiction True Stories , with the implication that fiction can be factual. (This from a past winner of the international Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction.) Garner has used the character ‘Helen’ before—for example, in the short story ‘Little Helen’, and the novel The Spare Room . In an article in the literary journal Meanjin , Garner said that the ‘I’ in a diary is a created persona; it has to be invented. Brennan declared Garner a boundary-crosser, refusing the constraints of literary genre.

‘All narratives are tendentious,’ critic James Ley wrote.

They are, as William Gass said, ‘sneaky justifications’ … Their truth is always provisional and subjective. There is no way around this … By being railroaded into a narrative, autobiography becomes fictionalised. This is not to say that memoirists are liars … but simply that their works are rhetorically indistinguishable from fiction and demand the same kind of interpretation, the same scrutiny of a self that is ultimately an image, false, like all images.

An epiphany about genre’s unboundedness arose for me from theories of the author function, intertextuality and genre itself. The dividing line between fiction and creative nonfiction is difficult to hold firm—not to mention between fiction and nonfiction when you’re reading, for example, institutional governance documents, governmental policy, or instruction manuals for digital devices. Writer Brian Castro claims that the innate oppositional practice or intent for (creative) writing is to cross the boundaries set up by genre, because classifications demolish nuances, imprisoning them in the expected. Ley says of hybrid literary works that they ‘explore the limits of expression and thus the boundaries of the self.’ All narrative is shaped and structured, and uses language. Of the latter, poet Stuart Cooke writes that it is ‘rarely the case’ that human language produces ‘intelligible semantic content’; the ‘material of language’ is a ‘complex assemblage of entangled gestures and inscriptions.’

In an interview about He. with Jasper Lindell for The Canberra Times , Bail queried genre: ‘[D]o you think it’s fiction? … I did use bits of timing and placement of things to form an overall narrative … It ends up reading like a story, doesn’t it?’ The implication here being that Bail wants it read as fiction. Lindell says it isn’t fiction, but he goes on to use the term ‘story’.

‘Hybrid creations are not singular’ says Bail’s wannabe-philosopher protagonist in The Pages . I take this as a negative comment on hybridity, since, generally, singularity is seen as original and unique, and since, specifically, the protagonist follows this with ‘they do not last’, commenting on ‘hybrid ewes and calves … struggling with five legs or … pink eyes’ he had seen on farms. Yet Bail’s own works build via intertextual referencing, the most obvious being the short story ‘The Drover’s Wife’, a response to Russell Drysdale’s painting and Henry Lawson’s short story of the same name, and the novel Eucalyptus filtered through fairy-tale and myth. But then in Bail’s novel Eucalyptus , Holland—a collector of eucalypts, whose species number more than 900—writes ‘nothing is one’.

All of the above is far easier to quote than negotiate in order to come to some operational meaning or procedure for genre. Garner has made strong comments about ‘making things up’: in the first diary she writes that she was scared to go to her office in case she couldn’t ‘imagine’. Journalist Kate Legge noted Garner saying that ‘nothing sets her teeth on edge so much as the “revving and grinding of someone’s imagination as they’re trying to make things up”.’ The simplest thing to say is that the diaries are a one-sided perspective on ‘reality’.

As a fan, I anticipated the Garner diaries with curiosity and some anxiety, for what happens next. One reader, bookbird64 , recorded a similar reaction on Instagram: ‘having felt amputated when Volume 2 ended, I was poised to read Vol 3 ASAP… (Those diaries are literary coke, I reckon.)’. Waiting on the diaries to be published over three years was akin to the consumption of the radio and television fiction I grew up on as a baby-boomer.

In waiting on, then reading the first diary, my fandom shifted from something benign to overzealousness, if not derangement: the first thing I did was seek out references to Murray Bail, and then re-read Bail’s Notebooks, his diaries, to find references to Garner.

Garner’s third diary deflated the excruciatingly naive affect of fandom, bringing the Valkyrie down to ordinary human dimensions. I am grateful, therefore, for the volume. I’m giving hero/ines up as a consequence. Such worship circumscribes the humanity (specifically its defining imperfection) of both the self and the putative hero/ine.

The third Garner diary was also andragogic in making me fully conscious of the depicted independence of certain female characters in Bail’s fiction.

In Holden’s Performance , Mrs Shadbolt, Holden’s mother, loses her husband, Holden’s father, to a tram accident, and, though taking on another paramour, she eventually comes to run a café with a fortune-telling side-line. In the same novel, Harriet Chandler, a young, single woman with polio, runs her own freelance career, drives a modified Mayflower and seemingly owns her own house (see also my short novel Harriet Chandler ); while Mrs Younghusband, who lost her husband in the second World War, runs a boarding house. Even Ellen in Eucalyptus , who is put-upon by her father seeking to marry her off to the man who can name all of his property’s eucalypts, is independent: pursuing wanderings on the property and an imaginative life.

Erica in The Pages is single and an academic/professional philosopher. In the short story ‘The Seduction of My Sister’, the sister, Glenys, finally breaks free of seeking the approval of her brother, the narrator, to take up with the boy next door, Gordon, whom her brother competes with in a sporting-like venture in which the brother loses the possibility of his sister’s close companionship. He openly admits that he is ‘ careless with possessions’ .

Bail is critical of women: Garner says in the third diary that, in an argument with him, she wondered ‘if in the end he was trying to argue me round to the point at which women can’t be artists.’ He disapproved of her therapy despite him appearing to have had as much difficulty with his father (as illustrated in He. ) as Garner did with hers. Bail is usually unsmiling and close-lipped in photographic portraits, and when he shows Garner a photograph of his father, she reacts: ‘his face … hard, clamped, full of some terrible inward-turned power—like someone who could have died of bottled-up emotion’. I suspect Bail has made critical remarks, mildly sneering, though sparingly and no naming nor alphabetical title, of Garner in his notebooks. This is possibly one reference to Garner, or the way I imagine her to be: ‘she cleaned her teeth vigorously, the way she tore open envelopes.’

Ellen in Eucalyptus could be based on Garner. Bail may have obtained his accurate descriptions of her depression from Garner, who had a year scouring similar emotional territory after her second marriage broke up in 1985. Kerryn Goldsworthy, in her monograph on Garner, quotes her describing herself as ‘all over the map … crawling …. it seemed to me that I was … finished in some way.’ In 1986, Bail may have encountered Garner (see chronology below) as she suffered for residual post-breakup depression. In 1993, roughly seven years into her relationship with Bail, which lasted around eleven years, she is suffering through the fallout of The First Stone, and questioning the validity of her interpretations and her feminism: ‘I crawled into bed … lost in shame and sadness’.

Before 1998, when their marriage broke up, Bail complains about her sadness. In Eucalyptus , published in 1998, Ellen gradually becomes more distressed as her patrilineal-arranged marriage gets closer. Janet in Cosmo Cosmolino is similar to Garner (as are Kath in Honour and Elizabeth in The Children’s Bach: see my ‘Head Girls and Helen Garner’s Women’): a writer separated from her former partner and living in a shared house. ‘Full of self-disgust, Janet lowered her head on to the tablecloth … and held it there’, or she lies on a sofa, unable to ask for help, ‘with her knees bent and her hands clasped’. In the third diary, Garner writes of a familiar posture of hers: ‘I lie on the couch, knees bent, enduring.’

Bail has relentlessly scathed the Anglo-Saxon Australian male in his novels (for example, Holden’s Performance). He is critical of himself in Notebooks : ‘Today I am sick of my own voice and opinions.’ He says to Garner, as recorded in her second diary, of his own diary publication in 1989: ‘this dreadful person who wrote them: severe, pompous, humourless.’ In He. , he expresses significant anxiety about his general state of ‘emotional distance’ which ‘had hardened him unnecessarily. Finally, he understood it to be a form of cheap protection.’ One of the opening lines of He. reads as follows: ‘Aged twelve he already has a certain earnestness, the solemnity, trying to comprehend what is incomprehensible.’ This is what makes He. revelatory, a door opening on vulnerability, while Garner’s How To End a Story is a closing one.

In her creative nonfiction piece ‘The Insults of Age’, Garner performs an old woman now completely abandoning the imprisoning quality of false propriety. She seizes a young schoolgirl’s ‘ponytail at the roots’, giving it ‘a sharp downward yank’, after the girl’s racist, and ageist, behaviour in public. Garner’s self-describes here too as ‘berserk’.

On the year of the third diary’s publication, another micro conflagration took place on social media over the timidity of contemporary fiction publishing. Literary critic Dustin Illingworth commented cannily : ‘In lieu of struggling toward a form commensurate with the time, the prose of even our short-listed books is so frictionless as to be ignorable. The novel creeps ever closer to … bingeable content.’

The diaries are bingeable, now the three are out together. While they’re not frictionless, they could be read as fiction, as suggested above, especially in mythic and archetypical dimensions (something the literary critic Susan Wyndham alerted me to via Twitter).

The pertinent archetypes are (1) the often quoted ‘Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned’; (2) a woman writer in need of a room of her own à la Virginia Woolf (Garner, forced to leave the shared flat with Bail so he can work alone during the day, hires office space.); and (3) the women in an artist–patriarch’s household subjugated to the demands of the patriarch’s artistic practice. Concerning the last item, a mention of Ford Maddox Ford on social media around the time of the publication of the third diary recalled for me the pleasure of reading Drawn from Life: A Memoir by Stella Bowen, who lived with the demanding Ford. ‘Ford never understood why I found it so difficult to paint whilst I was with him’; it was because she was tending to his needs. Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch was about that territory for Bowen and another painter, Grace Cossington-Smith. The title refers to Stravinsky’s insistence that his family eat their lunch in silence, because any noise would interrupt his concentration on composition. Garner compares notes with a friend who was married to a painter. ‘Like me, she is expected to run the house … all this without being permitted on the premises during work hours.’ In the second diary, V admits to never having made a salad or cleaned a toilet. Garner notes beginning to understand women who stay with men who are violent to them: ‘the shock … the dissolving into grief and shame …the nostalgia for past happiness.’

A chronology within the diaries would have explained much. I drew up one because I was distracted and frustrated during my reading, curious about alphabetised names, and constantly looking up the dates of Garner’s and Bail’s publications.

Pre-diaries

1967       Murray Bail marries Margaret Wordsworth.

1968       Helen Ford marries Bill Garner.

1975       Bail’s Contemporary Portraits and Other Stories published.

1977       Monkey Grip published.

First diary begins

1978      First year of first diary: Yellow Notebook: Diaries volume 1 1978-1987 . Some possibilities for some of the alphabetised characters: F: Garner’s second husband Jean-Jacques Portail; M: Garner’s daughter Alice; O: Garner’s friend Axel Clark; P: a model for the visual artist friend in Garner’s ‘Life of Art’; V: Garner’s third husband, the writer Murray Bail; Y: publisher/editor Di Gribble; Z: David Malouf.

1980      Honour and Other People’s Children published. Garner marries Portail. Bail’s Homesickness published.

1981      Bail’s Ian Fairweather published. Possibly, marriage to Portail breaking up.

1983      Garner writes The Children’s Bach .

1984      The Children’s Bach published.

1985      Postcards from Surfers published. The Garner–Portail marriage ends.

1986      Production of Two Friends film. Garner meets Murray Bail, introduced by Malouf at a lunch in his home, Sydney. Garner is 44 and Bail 45. Garner is reading Homesickness .

Second diary begins

1987      Last year of first diary. First year of second diary: One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995. Bail’s Holden’s Performance published. Notes related to Cosmo in diary. Possibilities for alphabetised characters: E: Drusilla Modjeska; J: Tim Winton; R: Alison Clark, Axel’s wife; ‘the adventurous beauty’: Robyn Davidson.

1988      Bail’s (editor) The Faber Book of Contemporary Australian Short Stories published containing Garner’s ‘The Life of Art’. Bail’s first marriage ends. Garner moves to Sydney. Bail’s Notebooks published 2005 include diary entries from 1988 to 2003. Garner writing Last Days of Chez Nous film script.

1989      Bail’s Longhand: A Writer’s Notebook 1970-1974 published.

1990      Garner writes Cosmo Cosmolino .

1991       Garner moves back to Melbourne with Bail.

1992      Film scripts Last Days of Chez Nous and Two Friends published. Cosmo Cosmolino published. Garner and Bail marry.

1994      Garner moves back to Sydney with Bail.

Third diary begins

1995      Second diary ends. First year of third diary: How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998 . The First Stone published. Arbitrary and vague possibilities for alphabetised characters: Scrabble player and Chinese expert: Linda Jaivin; My publisher: Hilary McPhee; X: Aida Tomescu; AB: Robyn Davidson

1996      True Stories: Selected Non-fiction published.

1998      Third diary ends. My Hard Heart: Selected Fiction published. End of marriage to Bail, though official divorce is later. Bail’s Eucalyptus and The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories published. Garner is 56 and Bail 57.

Post-diaries

2001       Feel of Steel published containing some pieces about the period immediately after the breakdown of the third marriage—for example, ‘Tower Diary’ and ‘Woman in a Green Mantle’.

2005      Bail’s Notebooks published; they occasionally seem to make reference to Garner.

2019       First diary published.

2020        Second diary published.

2021      Third diary published. Bail’s He. published; it occasionally seems to make reference to Garner.

Looking at this chronology, I feel as if I lay bare, frozen-heartedly, a memento mori for impersonal, disinterested scrutiny, just like an archaeologist unaware of Indigenous cultural propriety surrounding the use of unearthed artefacts. I experience as much horror towards myself as I did towards Garner on reading the third diary (and she toward herself: ‘I’m sick and tired of myself.’). But much of this chronology is in the public realm, and it takes little effort to google successfully with key words—for example, it’s the way I came across Aida Tomescu, whom I assume is X in the diary, a painter, influenced by Fairweather, living in the inner-city of Sydney. 

In the National Library of Australia, in Bail’s freely accessible correspondence, writers Thomas Shapcott and Rodney Hall (1975), and Shirley Hazzard (1987) end their letters with best wishes to Margaret and Bail. In 1988, novelist David Malouf writes to Bail from Italy: ‘Hope you are bearing up’; offers a place ‘if you and she [Helen] wanted to get right away for a bit’; ‘Look after yourself. Hope everything has begun to settle a bit—when do you move into the apartment? Helen has seen it, I know, and thinks it should suit you quite well. Love to Margaret’. Poet Mark Strand offers an (undated) consolation: ‘I’m sorry about you and Margaret. It happens. But you seem to be happy now.’ (What I assume are Garner’s letters to Bail require permission, as do Garner’s. I wouldn’t expect to get it.)

What is clear in the chronology is that Garner was having some kind of relationship with Bail during his marriage. In 1988, she writes: ‘I am always reminding myself that he is not mine, that he belongs to somebody else, that it’s not safe to fantasise being with him always.’ In the first diary, she is in some kind of relationship with L, but a ‘reticent, half-hearted’ one; he is in a similar relationship with another woman; she wants to tell L: ‘I think I’ve fallen in love with someone else.’ In the third diary, Garner believes Bail has been unfaithful, potentially with X, during their marriage, and her secondary problem is that he will not admit it. She does acknowledge that it’s not all Bail’s fault. She ‘wanted so much to be loved’ that she tried to make herself lovable, but instead made herself ‘sick with swallowed rage.’

H does think of V as ‘the love of her life’. Brennan writes: ‘Garner readily admits that Bail influenced her intellectual life’ ; he expanded her horizons; friends talked of ‘their joy in each other’. Speaking to Hilary Harper on ABC RN’s Life Matters , Garner declares she is not suited to marriage, that it would terrible being married to her, and that she has hurt people.

Garner was an admirer of Janet Malcolm, who died last year, and their nonfiction can perhaps be compared. Writer Richard Beck writes in N+1 that Malcolm allowed her emotional life ‘to flood’ her prose. He declares it is necessary for a writer ‘to accept the violence of your own mind and try to maintain a sense of compassion, both for yourself and for the people you’re writing about, whose lives you will inevitably distort.’ Yet is it not a writer’s proclivity to be part of but outside events in order to observe, remember, and record? As Garner puts it in ‘Woman in a Green Mantle’ (in The Feel of Steel ), writers are ‘voracious monsters, ravening beasts who roam the world seeking whom and what they may devour.’ This, in a creative nonfiction piece after the break-up of her marriage.

On reading He. , Lindell asks: ‘Can you write knowingly about yourself?’ He insists that Bail does not author his life, but uses memories to create a different kind of revealing self-portrait. ‘Divulging secrets and dropping names isn’t the only way to uncover something of ourselves.’ I interpret this to be a critique of Garner.

V tells Helen that ‘he hated and deplored the thought that she wrote about him.’ But as with Bowen and Ford, H writes that V

will never understand that writing about my life is the only thing that makes it possible for me to live it … Actually I feel real sympathy for him. It must be awful to know his life is being reported through my eyes. It would be awful to be married to me.

However, as noted above, Bail has kept notebooks and published them, also using, albeit sparingly, letters to stand in for names. One such letter is S, whom I assume is Shirley Hazzard. Hazzard wrote to Bail in 1982 about the ‘obsessive flogging of vomit in Australian writing and images.’ In Holden’s Performance (not published until 1987), a drunken cricket team member goes to Manly’s Epic Theatre and vomits in the foyer. In Notebooks , Bail records ‘S’s prissy aversion to vomit.’

Some letters Bail has deposited in his archive are not flattering to their authors. For example, Robyn Davidson is intemperate about Salman Rushdie, and the publishing industry. She receives a letter ‘full of evil intent’ from Rushdie, whom she calls a ‘horrid little fatty,’ and burns it. And of literary agents and publishers, she says: ‘They are all … collections of scum eddying in small stagnant pools.’

While the third Garner diary is dominated by the imploding marriage to Bail, all three volumes contain contextualising cultural and political events. The second diary mentions the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the dismantling of the Berlin wall, the aftermath of the AIDS crisis, and our changing climate.  There’s always family: her mother, father, sisters and especially Garner’s daughter. Regarding the last one, here is one remark: ‘Walking in Paris with M, how easy it is—I drift along, invisible, but attached to her little bubble of beauty.’

There are descriptions of writing and publishing processes: ‘Astonished again by the intense fatigue that hits me after I’ve written a piece of journalism.’ And lyrical responses to nature and place: ‘[a] perfect sunny spring day. A bird calls with a cheerful, plaintive insistence … Dead leaves off a Virginia creeper blow in on a warm breeze.’ Differences between Garner and Bail are oddly symbolised by their feeling at home in Melbourne and Sydney respectively (two traditionally competitive Australian cities), the division between Melbourne (serious) and Sydney (flibbertigibbet) being reversed between Garner and Bail.

The third diary devotes much space to Garner’s therapy sessions. She mentions teaching herself to sew, and buying a machine. My sewing machines are from the dead: close and extended family members. My mother and middle sister were sewers. My plans have included both teaching myself sewing and taking lessons. Bail’s mother was a milliner and did the flowers for the church . My mother, too, was and did.

How would a reader new to Garner receive the diaries? In frame would be the physiognomy of a writing life. The following reading is propaedeutic: Brennan’s A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work , a hybrid of literary criticism and biography (‘Garner’s life and writing inform and shape each other to such a degree that it is not possible to understand one without the other’). Modjeska’s Second Half First (Garner had an office in Modjeska’s house). Michael Ackland’s The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail , part biography, part literary criticism. Bail’s Fairweather (Bail identifies to some extent with Fairweather: a lover of abstraction, a slow worker, a relative hermit). And He. : a portrait of Bail’s life.

I thought I’d heard or read, somewhere, Garner say in 2021 that she had ‘met another bloke.’ I could have imagined it, but my imagination is wanting and my memory suspect. But then I heard that the relationship between Bail and possibly Aida Tomescu ended, and he went on to partner another woman. As I write this, I’m fully aware of Malcolm’s comment on reading biography as akin to voyeurism. I can hardly stand myself—as Garner said of herself in the first volume of her diary.

While the hardcovers of the first two diary volumes are in the primary colours of sunshine yellow and heart red, the third volume is in coffee, milk chocolate, nut or dirt brown: a composite colour.

Ackland , M. The Experimental Fiction of Murray Bail . Cambria Press. 2012. Adams, J and Goodman, A. Nixon in China . 1987. Bail, M. Fairweather . Bay Books. 1981. Bail, M. Holden’s Performance . Penguin, 1987. Bail, M. ‘The Seduction of My Sister’ . Picador New Writing 3. B. Yahp and D. Modjeska (eds). Picador. 1995. Bail, M. Eucalyptus . Text Publishing. 1998. Bail, M. ‘The Drover’s Wife’. The Drover’s Wife and Other Stories . Text. 1998. Bail, M . Notebooks 1970-2003 . Harvill Secker. 2005. Bail, M. He. Text Publishing. 2021. Beck, R. ‘On Janet Malcolm’. N+1 . 2021. Bowen, S. Drawn from Life: A Memoir . Picador. 2002. Brennan, B. A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work . Text Publishing, 2017. Castro, B. Looking for Estrellita . University of Queensland Press. 1999. Costello, M. ‘Head Girls and Helen Garner’s Women’. Imago . 9.3 summer. 1997. Costello, M. Harriet Chandler . Short Odds Publications. 2014. Costello, M. ‘Empirical Evidence and Desire’ (review of Yellow Notebook : Diaries Volume I 1978–1987 , Helen Garner). TEXT , Vol 24 No 1 April. 2020 Costello, M. ‘Practical Circumstance’ (review of One Day I’ll remember This: Diaries 1987-1995 , Helen Garner). TEXT . Vol 25 No1 April. 2021. Davidson, R. Letter to Murray Bail. Papers of Murray Bail, 1950-2001 . National Library of Australia. N.d. Drysdale, R. The Drover’s Wife . National Gallery of Australia. 1945. Garner, H. Honour and Other People’s Children . McPhee Gribbl. 1980. Garner, H. The Children’s Bach . McPhee Gribble. 1984. Garner, H. ‘Little Helen’. Postcards from Surfers . McPhee Gribble. 1985. Garner, H . Cosmo Cosmolino . McPhee Gribble/Penguin. 1992. Garner, H. The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power . Random House. 1997. Garner, H. ‘Woman in a Green Mantle’. The Feel of Steel . Picador. 2001. Garner, H. Joe Cinque’s Consolation . Picador. 2004. Garner, H. The Spare Room . Text Publishing. 2008. Garner. H. ‘The Insults of Age’. Everywhere I Look . Text Publishing. 2016. Garner, H. True Stories: The Collected Short Nonfiction . Text Publishing. 2017. Garner, H. Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume I 1978–1987 . Text Publishing. 2019. Garner, H. One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries 1987–1995. Text Publishing. 2020. Garner, H. How To End a Story Diaries 1995–1998 . Text Publishing. 2021.  Goldsworthy, K. Helen Garner . Oxford University Press. 1996. Grosz, E. Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth. Columbia University Press. 2012. Hall, R. Letter to Murray Bail. Papers of Murray Bail, 1950-2001 . National Library of Australia. 1975. Hazzard, S. Letter to Murray Bail. Papers of Murray Bail, 1950-2001 . National Library of Australia. 1982. Hazzard, S. Letter to Murray Bail. Papers of Murray Bail, 1950-2001 . National Library of Australia. 1987. Larson, S. ‘The Kindest’. American Short Fiction . Issue 65. 2020. Lawson, H. ‘The Drover’s Wife’. The Henry Lawson Short Stories. Penguin. 2009. Legge, K. ‘Truly Helen’. The Weekend Australian Magazine . March. 2008. Ley, J. ‘The Tyranny of the Literal’. Australian Book Review . April. 2005. Lindell, J. ‘Miles Franklin-winner Murray Bail on Pinning down Memory with Novelist’s Eye’. The Canberra Times . 2021. Malcolm, J. The Silent Women: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes . Picador. 1994. Malouf, D. Letter to Murray Bail. Papers of Murray Bail, 1950-2001 . National Library of Australia. 1988. Mead, J. (Ed). Bodyjamming: Sexual Harassment, Feminism and Public Life . Random House, 1997. Modjeska, D. Stravinsky’s Lunch . Picador. 1999. Modjeska, D. Second Half First . Penguin. 2016. Roupenian, K. ‘Cat Person’. New Yorker . December 11, 2017. Shapcott, T. Letter to Murray Bail. Papers of Murray Bail, 1950-2001 . National Library of Australia. 1975. Strand, M. Letter to Murray Bail. Papers of Murray Bail, 1950-2001 . National Library of Australia. N.d.

Overland ’s  Friday Features  project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

Moya Costello

Moya Costello has two books of short creative prose, two short novels, and one collection of prose poems published, with scholarly and creative work in journals, newspapers, anthologies and on audio and video. She taught creative writing for over ten years and is currently an Adjunct Lecturer with Southern Cross University. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Adelaide. She has read at many venues, judged many writing competitions, been a guest at many Australian writers’ festivals, and been awarded Australian federal and state government writing grants.

Overland is a not-for-profit magazine with a proud history of supporting writers, and publishing ideas and voices often excluded from other places.

If you like this piece, or support Overland ’s work in general, please subscribe or donate .

Related articles & Essays

Why we should value not only lived experience, but also lived expertise

Andrew Charlton’s school assignment

Exquisite, heart-touching critique by poet, teacher, mentor of this student of life. Thorough and clear, and kind writing brings clarity to complicated personal history of our great Garner.

thank you Vicki!

Isn’t the final volume blue?

Not the hard cover, which I asked Overland to use as the image.

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Helen Garner: How to End a Story

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Friday, 20 May 2022, 12:00pm - 03:00pm

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Helen Garner is one of Australia’s most respected writers. Her novels, short stories, essays, journalism, and more recently her diaries – including her latest instalment, How to End a Story: Diaries: 1995–1998 – have influenced generations of Australian writers and are a fixture of Melbourne’s collective consciousness.

Over a long lunch at Montalto, she joins Sean O’Beirne, author of the recent monograph On Helen Garner , to discuss her immense contribution to Australian literature, and the unmistakable currents of candor and independence that have run through her writing life.

The bookseller for this event is  Antipodes Bookshop and Gallery .

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Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Award. In 2019 she was hon... Read more

Sean O’Beirne is a bookseller and critic. He grew up in Melbourne’s outer suburbs, and studied arts, law and acting.  A Couple of Things Before the End  is his first book. 

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Helen Garner: ‘People would give me death stares in the street’

The novelist and nonfiction writer on her love of courtroom drama, the trials of cancel culture and why she wouldn’t have been a good psychoanalyst

H elen Garner was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1942. She worked as a teacher and as a journalist before her first novel, Monkey Grip , came out in 1977. Garner has since published novels, stories, screenplays and several volumes of her diaries, but she may be best known for her acclaimed nonfiction, which includes The First Stone (1995), about a university college principal who is accused of groping two female students, and This House of Grief (2014), which tells the story of Robert Farquharson, on trial for the murder of his three sons. In 2016, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell literature prize for nonfiction. New editions of three of Garner’s best-known books have just been published in the UK.

For a long time, you were Australia’s great secret. How do you feel about all the new attention you’re getting in the US and the UK? I guess it would be annoying if I’d had hopes, in all those years, that I’d ever get published outside Australia. But strangely, I never did. I’m aware this sounds like “little me” talk. But in Australia, in my generation and among those who were slightly older like Germaine [Greer], people would get their books published in London first, and then come back to us. You had to get out of here! That was everybody’s aim, because everything important happened somewhere else. I never felt I had to get out, though. Perhaps this was because I wasn’t really an intellectual. I was just somebody with a pathetic third-class degree who taught in high school.

Did that attitude have an effect on your style? It meant that I didn’t adapt my way of writing for some fantasised international audience. I didn’t have to explain Australian things; to do massive introductory descriptions of Sydney harbour. I wanted to write about stuff I knew and had lived; about the sorts of people I’d grown up with.

Monkey Grip , about a single mother’s relationship with a junkie, was controversial when it came out, wasn’t it? Yes. This bloke [a critic] said: she has just published her diary. I felt snarky about it, but I ignored it. It was much worse when I was attacked later for The First Stone . If I published something like that now, I’d be cancelled. People were mad with rage. They said I’d set feminism back 20 years [by suggesting the victims of the assault had overreacted]. I was flabbergasted by those attacks, and the way they went on and on. People would give me death stares in the street. I’d be in some cafe, I’d get a bad feeling, and turn round and there would be some young woman staring at me. But I get letters of apology now, which is very gracious. One said: “I was doing women’s studies at university, and I ran around with my little tin whistle of outrage. But now I’m out in the world and I can see things aren’t so black and white.”

What did you make of #MeToo , given that The First Stone anticipates the arguments around it? At first, I thought: wow, this is great. Some of these guys are going to get what they deserve; they’re going to get their asses kicked. I was happy about that. But as it rolled on, so many people hitched their wagon to it. That terrible, self-righteous tone… The whole idea that some people get cancelled, and that other people are so tremulous and don’t feel safe when they hear an opinion. I find that repulsive and stupid.

Is it true you began writing nonfiction because your then husband was a novelist, and didn’t want you on his patch? That was my third husband [the Australian writer Murray Bail], though he would never actually have said it. He had a very stern hierarchy of forms, and the novel was right at the top. He’d never written for money; he’d never been a journalist. But all my writing life, I’ve made a living as a freelance, and I love it with a passion because it gives you an entree into the lives of strangers. I don’t think he thought I was as good as he was, and I think that I unconsciously shifted to [a place] where we wouldn’t be rivals.

How do you feel about nonfiction now? The First Stone sold a hell of a lot of copies, and from then on I began to feel I belonged on that side of the line. I feel at ease in nonfiction. I’ve learned how to use myself in it: to say to the reader, let’s look at this together.

You love a courtroom, don’t you? My hearing is going now, so those strange acoustic spaces are difficult. But it used to be that I couldn’t wait to get there in the morning. When you’re watching a trial, you’re watching how society tries to deal with human wildness.

Would you say that in a book like This House of Grief you’re fascinated by the line that separates the person who commits a crime, and the person who doesn’t? It’s not really a line. It’s a very fine membrane, like a net – and you can put your foot right through it, and down you go. I’m not interested in psychopaths, because there’s no ethical struggle going on.

The American writer Janet Malcolm , a Freudian, has been a big influence on you. Did you mean it when you once said you should have been a psychoanalyst? I think now that I wouldn’t have been very good at it. When I was kicked out of teaching [for giving an unscheduled sex education lesson], I should have joined the police. I reckon that would have suited me better. But I do find analysis fascinating, especially the way you see it in Malcolm’s work: that extreme concentration on what people are like when they’re talking. I’ve followed her example, especially as it’s laid out in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes , which is fantastic. I had the chance to meet her once. I chickened out.

What are you reading now? A Heart So White by Javier Marías . I’m loving it. And I’ve had a bit of a resurgence with all those wartime writers called Elizabeth: Bowen, Jenkins, Taylor. Elizabeth Jenkins’s The Hare and the Tortoise is a really great book.

What about your next book? It won’t be out until November, because it’s about my youngest grandson’s football team – Aussie rules, not soccer. He’s got all these exams, and I thought it would be distracting if there was a book out about him and all his friends. I love football. It’s so beautiful and, to me, heroic. The body language of footballers in moments of shame as well as triumph is like the postures you see in Greek sculpture. Really, it’s a book about men.

Monkey Grip , The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief (with an introduction by Rachel Cooke) are published by W&N (£9.99) in the UK and by Text in Australia. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copies at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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Helen Flanagan shares mental health struggles and 'heartbreaking' reason for pulling out of West End show

Helen Flanagan, who's best known for her role as Rosie Webster in Coronation Street, was replaced in Cluedo 2 at the last minute by Strictly winner Ellie Leach.

Arts and entertainment reporter @BethanyMinelle

Thursday 28 March 2024 12:26, UK

Coronation Street star Helen Flanagan says she was sent into a psychosis after suffering a "bad reaction" to her ADHD medication earlier this year.

The 33-year-old TV star, who's best known for her role as Rosie Webster in Coronation Street , shared the news on Instagram, after a couple of months away from social media.

She said she was left "emotionally struggling" after splitting from the father of her children, footballer Scott Sinclair - with whom she shares Matilda, seven, Delilah, five, and Charlie, two.

She also explained her reason for pulling out of a theatre tour of Cluedo 2 which kicked off last month, saying it was due to a bad reaction to her medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

At the time, it was announced that Flanagan had withdrawn from the show for "medical reasons".

Alongside a selfie with her giving the peace sign, she wrote: "Had a few months off from social but I'm back now.

"So basically I really struggled mental health wise December/January. I felt really not great in my head over Christmas and I didn't really feel that much different when I took the kids away for new year.

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"I had a lot of difficult things going on things I just can't talk about on Instagram.

"I felt terrible, so I was due my theatre tour which I was excited about so when I came back from holiday I thought it was best for me to take some medication so I'd feel better and be able to cope better with being a working single mum of three and I was emotionally struggling with the break up from the father of my kids."

'I just love my kids so much'

She added: "I had a really bad reaction though to the medication (an ADHD medication) and it sent me into a psychosis for a few days which I didn't know I was in.

"I just love my kids so much, this bad reaction though was a few days before rehearsals were starting and sadly I just wasn't mentally well enough to do it.

"I was heartbroken as I've always been professional as an actress but I needed to stay at home and feel better for me and my kids, with the help of my amazing parents."

She added that she felt like she was in a "really good happy place" and has found therapy "amazing".

She said: "I feel like I've worked on myself with things that were quite tough to me but I feel lighter now."

Flanagan was replaced in the role of Miss Scarlett in Cluedo 2 by Strictly Come Dancing winner Ellie Leach, who was one of the fellow celebrities to comment on Flanagan's post, writing "love you" with three kisses.

Other stars including Ex-Girls Aloud singer Nadine Coyle, presenter Carol Vorderman and Coronation Street actresses Lucy Fallon and Brooke Vincent also showed their support.

Flanagan played Rosie Webster in the Manchester-based ITV soap from 2000 to 2012, returning to the role between 2017 and 2018.

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It's time to stop downsizing health care, the Pentagon says. This couple can't wait

Quil Lawrence

Matt and Helen Perry at their home in Yulee, Fla. Michelle Bruzzese for NPR hide caption

Matt and Helen Perry at their home in Yulee, Fla.

When Matt and Helen Perry first met in 2010, he had been a U.S. Marine long enough to form two strong opinions. He didn't like the U.S. Army, and he didn't like officers — which he told her on their first date.

"And I was, you know, an Army medical officer," Helen recalls.

They got married anyhow, and Matt went on the last of his four combat deployments while Helen worked at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center outside Washington, D.C. Her worst fear — that she'd see Matt come in on a medevac — never came to pass. She did start to worry though, about the military medical system that was treating troops and their families. In 2013 the Perrys were stationed at Fort Stewart, Ga.

U.S. Marine Sgt. Matt Perry on deployment in Djibouti, 2012 Matt and Helen Perry hide caption

"They were looking at closing Winn Army Medical Community Medical Hospital," says Perry.

Winn Hospital cares for tens of thousands of troops and more than twice that many family members and military retirees living near Fort Stewart. But the Pentagon was abuzz with plans to cut military medical costs, especially on families and retirees, by outsourcing them to local private health care — much to the chagrin of local providers, Helen Perry recalls.

"I vividly remember them putting out an article in the newspaper that was like ... 'We cannot absorb your obstetrical care. We can't absorb your inpatient care. We do not have the resources to absorb the amount of care that you would then be pushing out into the community,'" says Perry.

Obstetrics may not spring to mind when people think about military medicine, but troops get to have families. With the Pentagon pushing them off base to find care, the military hospitals lost the patient base they needed to justify keeping specialty clinicians. It didn't make sense to Perry.

"I was saying, well, why don't we just get the services? Why don't we get cardiology? We had it at one time, why did we lose it? Oh, well, we weren't seeing enough patients," she says.

The business end of cost-cutting

To Perry it looked like a death spiral — downsizing to the point where the military hospital is no longer viable . She even suspected some of the hospitals were attempting to avoid closure by keeping hold of patients they couldn't actually treat, to keep up numbers and justify staying open. When Perry asked questions, as a critical care nurse and junior officer, no one wanted to hear it.

"It's like, 'Lt. Perry, that's beyond you. Do your job. Stay quiet,'" she says.

She wasn't wrong though. She was just on the business end of a decades-long realignment, where the four branches of the military combined their medical services under one health agency and tried to cut costs. This year the Department of Defense has finally admitted that it's not going as planned.

"All these challenges and changes have created and affected our ability to generate and sustain a medically ready force and a ready medical force," says Dr. David Smith, deputy assistant secretary of Defense for health.

Army Capt. and critical care nurse Helen Perry at the Combat Support Hospital in Fort Eisenhower, Ga., in 2018. Matt and Helen Perry hide caption

Army Capt. and critical care nurse Helen Perry at the Combat Support Hospital in Fort Eisenhower, Ga., in 2018.

Smith is talking about two of the three missions of military health. A "medically ready force" means keeping the country's army in good health. A "ready medical force" means training up enough doctors and nurses to keep that army healthy and treat the wounds of war. There's a third part though: taking care of all the military family members who get dragged across the country every time a service member gets ordered to a new base.

The Pentagon has been trying to outsource the less war-related parts, says John Whitley, former acting secretary of the Army.

"We don't want to go back to the days of ... not having the trauma surgeons, the emergency medicine physicians, the critical care physicians we need, and instead having a force of pediatricians and obstetricians and family practice docs," he told NPR.

Of course, troops might not agree that keeping their families healthy is a lower priority.

"As if it doesn't matter to the war fighter whether or not their family members can access quality care," says Karen Ruedisueli with the Military Officers Association of America.

National Security

The self-proclaimed 'bipolar general' is waging war on the stigma of mental illness.

"If they're hearing from the family back home that they're struggling to get medical care, they can't focus on the mission," she says.

"And then my husband started having seizures"

Americans join the military for patriotic, but also practical, reasons and the quality of health care affects recruiting. In recent years, surveys show that health care is a growing concern for active duty families and also retirees as Helen and Matt Perry soon discovered.

"I stayed for two years at Fort Stewart, and I was seeing the results of families not having good access to care. And then my husband started having seizures," she says.

Matt's seizures hit in July of 2014, six years after a series of blast injuries in Afghanistan had left him with a traumatic brain injury.

"We knew he had a TBI. He got blown up three times in Afghanistan in 2008, like big booms. And we knew things were a little bit harder to learn for him after that. He was a little bit more forgetful. I mean, he had all of the classic sort of early TBI stuff that we see from, from most of our guys who've been blown up, but we just didn't know how bad it was," she says.

His first seizure lasted several minutes and he stopped breathing. A few hours later, he seized again and Helen took him to the nearest emergency room.

"He woke up in the ICU. He didn't know me, didn't know his name, didn't know anything," she says.

"We were not at a military facility. So they kept asking me like, did he ever have infantile seizures as a child? I would say, he got blown up really bad. And they would say, you know, all those explosions you see on television, that's not really how it happens," she says.

Matt's debilitating injuries sent the Perrys on a painful odyssey of seeking care within the military, trying to get Helen's Army superiors to assign her near the Marine base where Matt could get treated, and finally getting Matt the right medical discharge and the benefits he'd earned. Helen eventually left active duty and became his full-time caregiver.

"That's where we started to kind of find out all of the challenges with Tricare," she says.

Tricare is the military health care program for troops, families and retirees - which used to mean just going to almost any doctor and Tricare paid for it. In recent years the cost to military families has shot up , and millions of troops rely on Medicaid in addition to Tricare. And as the Perrys discovered, it's gotten harder to find doctors who accept it. They moved to Daytona Beach for a nursing job Helen landed, but it didn't work for Matt's care, or Helen's, or their newly arrived baby boy in 2021.

"We could not find anyone to accept Tricare, period. I work in health care so I knew all the people, so I was calling around trying to find a primary care provider," says Helen.

But the answer was consistent.

" 'Sorry, we don't take Tricare.' 'Sorry, we're not open to new patients.' We couldn't find a pediatrician for our son. Same thing — 'Sorry, we don't take Tricare,' " she says.

Not only is there a nationwide shortage of health care professionals after that pandemic, but, like Medicaid, Tricare reimburses at a lower rate than private health insurance. Helen says doctors told her they just couldn't afford to take Tricare patients. And she was hearing the same thing from other military caregivers nationwide.

"I got onto our little online forum, and I said, is anybody else having problems finding providers accepting Tricare?"

The replies came in a tidal wave.

"Can't find anybody to take us, we're commuting two hours, we're commuting five hours," she says.

The Perrys moved to the Jacksonville area in large part because that's where they found providers. In the meantime though, Helen was making lists of military communities where people can't find care, including many bases located in federally designated health care shortage areas.

NPR contacted a dozen families with similar complaints. Notably, the majority declined to be interviewed on the record, out of concern they'd get in trouble with their command. They told the same stories: They can't get care on base, and they can't find Tricare appointments in town. A Pentagon Inspector General Report echoed their complaints.

"Well, you can't get care at the military, so now you're gonna get care through Tricare. When they both fail, which is what they're currently doing, where are service members expected to go?" says Helen Perry.

The answer to veterans homelessness could be one of LA's most expensive neighborhoods

Pentagon about-face on private care.

David Smith, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense, says the Pentagon has realized the private sector doesn't have any extra capacity to lean on, and after a decade of pushing private care, the Pentagon will now do the opposite.

"We're having difficulties with access across the system. And so what we've concluded is bringing more into our system will actually have the best benefit. I think that's part of the epiphany," he told NPR.

That epiphany took the form of a recent DOD internal memo titled " Stabilizing and Improving the Military Health System ." The memo looks back at a decade's worth of downsizing and outsourcing and concludes, "This has resulted in increasing overall health care costs for the Department and missing readiness opportunities for the Force."

The memo calls on the Military Health System to grow and attract more patients back on to base for their health care. Smith says the Pentagon will train or hire more doctors and nurses to re-fill its clinics. The memo directs the Pentagon to review all medical staffing levels by June 30th. It may be the start of another long and monumental attempt to change military health care.

New memories

Helen Perry is glad to hear a fix is coming, but she hasn't seen any sign of that memo in action yet. Matt is making new memories with their son and now a baby daughter. He's seems at peace with the memories that he's lost.

"Stuff from way, way back there, that's kind of wiped clean. That hard drive's gone," he says.

Helen and Matt Perry at Helen's promotion to captain in July 2015, at San Antonio Military Medical Center, Texas. Matt and Helen Perry hide caption

Helen and Matt Perry at Helen's promotion to captain in July 2015, at San Antonio Military Medical Center, Texas.

That's a blessing in one way. Matt doesn't remember his time at war, so he doesn't have PTSD. When he gets frustrated, he calls one of his Marine battle-buddies. They remember.

"When I get a lot of anxiety or I just need to get away, I talk to them. I used to see a ... therapist. And that was OK, but they don't understand what I went through. Once I started talking to my buddies, man, that is the best therapy you can have right there. And it's free," says Matt.

Matt knows his biggest champion is Helen. Now retired from the reserves, she does aid work in conflict zones, like Ukraine, as a critical care nurse. Still, Matt worries that he's holding her back.

"There's a lot of stuff I wish was different. Like I know she wanted to become a doctor. I know she wants to do a lot more humanitarian work, but ... there's always that worry that something happens to me while she's gone," he says.

They juggle their two young kids between them, but being Matt's caregiver can be a full-time job. That, along with having been an Army nurse and a Tricare patient gives Helen some expertise she thinks the Pentagon and Congress might lack.

"I can speak to it from an active duty officer, from a reserve officer ... I can speak to it as a medical provider currently working in the health care system, and as a caregiver. I can speak to it from every angle, and I want to know that they know because I don't think that they do. Because I think if they did, they would be doing different things," she says.

Recently, Matt's condition has gotten unstable again. That means they are looking, again, for a new medical team that accepts Tricare.

• Health Care

David Wenham to Star in ‘SPIT,’ Sequel to Australian Hit Film ‘Gettin’ Square’

By Patrick Frater

Patrick Frater

Asia Bureau Chief

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“Lord of the Rings,” “Elvis” and “Faraway Downs” star David Wenham is to reprise one of other his best-known roles in upcoming feature “ SPIT .”

The picture is a sequel to 2003 comedy crime thriller “Gettin’ Square,” in which Wenham played Johnny ‘Spit’ Spitteri, a recently-released ex-convict and Sam Worthington (“Avatar”) played an older brother trying to keep the kid out of trouble.

Production of “SPIT” has got underway in Gold Coast and Brisbane, Queensland and will continue through May.

It is produced by Trish Lake of Queensland-based Freshwater Pictures alongside Greg Duffy, Felicity McVay and Wenham. It received major production investment from Screen Australia with local distribution by Transmission Films and international rights sales managed by Moviehouse Entertainment. 

In “SPIT,’ Spitteri finds himself locked up in an immigration detention centre upon his return to Australia. With old enemies on his tail and a target on his back, he navigates a series of comedic misadventures, sharing with his fellow detainees the meaning of mateship and what it is to be truly Australian. 

“Barely a day goes by when I am not asked about Johnny Spitieri, a character I played more than 20 years ago. Spit was a character that endeared himself to audiences—bad habits, bad haircut and bad fashion aside, he was the quintessential Everyman, a little man doing his best under seemingly impossible circumstances,” said Wenham.

Returning cast includes Helen Thomson, David Field, David Roberts and Gary Sweet, with ‘Spit’ also introducing new characters to be played by Arlo Green, Ayik Daniel Chut Deng, Sam and Teagan Rybka (The Rybka Twins) and Sami Afuni.

Returning crew includes Garry Phillips as director of photography, Nick McCallum as production designer, Julie Forster as consulting line producer, Greg Apps as casting director, Sheila Lind as production account and Tess Natoli as hair and make-up designer.

“Australia has seen a lot of changes in 22 years, and while SPIT holds onto many of the values of the original movie, it’s definitely a story that resonates with contemporary audiences. We want to make a new movie that is exciting and that embraces the Gold Coast and Queensland culture, but one that will stand the test of time, just like the original has done,” said Lake.

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