Lucy Thynne
Becoming a Two
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One Day I’ll Remember This: Collected Diaries, Helen Garner, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025, pp. 816, £20.00
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For the past year and a half, on and off, I have lived another woman’s life. It is impossible not to bring the ‘I’ into this review because this woman is the Australian writer Helen Garner, and the books are her diaries. If you have read a published diary, you will know about that unique immersion into a person’s life and voice, how their dailiness is read alongside your own; these are no pared-back autobiographies, but messy, uneven texts. In Garner’s case, they retain their spontaneity and candour because she never composed them for publication. Only in 2018 did she begin filleting them (she is now 82); only now do they arrive in the UK.
They begin like this. Garner is 36 in 1978 and has moved to Paris on a writing grant. The success of her debut and now cult classic, Monkey Grip, has left her with a bad case of impostor syndrome, though she would never call it this: she goes out ‘drinking and dancing’, then crashes into ‘appalling bouts of self-doubt, revulsion at my past behaviour… the fact I still need to expose’. On bad days, she has fantasies of a ‘real job with people I didn’t particularly like, so that I wouldn’t have to produce my own raison d’être every day, like a spider yanking thread out of its own guts’. Soon she returns to Melbourne, where over the next 25 or so years, she publishes The Children’s Bach, writes a screenplay, other novels and meets her third husband, ‘V’, widely acknowledged as the writer Murray Bail. That he is already married is both an annoyance and a thrill.
Her descriptions are so precise that you could read the diaries only for them.
No entry is marked with a specific date, only the year. Entries can be lone floating lines or run to pages. Sometimes you forget you’re in the eighties or nineties altogether until an entry like this: ‘Today I bought a computer… 800 dollars. It was traumatic.’ The cast of her friends is a shape that constantly shifts, rearranges – each of them known by initials, except the occasional epithets: the born-again, the law student, the Polish philosopher, her nun. They’re characters, until they become rare mirrors of Garner from a different angle – ‘you’re too sensitive, hypersensitive’, one tells her – photographs taken from a long lens.
Her descriptions are so precise that you could read the diaries only for them. At sunset she observes ‘a long pink cloud, ridged as neat and fine as salmon flesh’. With a man in her bed: ‘We sleep, or rather he sleeps, and I drift all night just below the surface, with occasional brief dives deeper.’
She can be judgmental, but always wittily, and only if someone deserves it:
Elizabeth Jolley, in her dutiful way, tried to inform me of the literary status of a woman in an ugly flowered dress and thick pancake make up to whom she was introducing me. The woman cut across her: ‘I’ve published two novels,’ she said, ‘and countless stories in the US.’ Countless was the word she used.
Later, she dismisses Virginia Woolf and her ‘flabby Bloomsbury arse’.
So much has already been said about the publication of diaries. We could talk about their morality (her now-divorced husband, V, is still alive) or Garner’s pruning of them (what shorn sentences pile around her desk?). But in this case what I found so interesting is that in the diaries’ dailiness, they allow for capaciousness, an expression – as with a regular routine of writing – of a relationship’s good days and bad. Reading them, I thought often about how, with two friends recently, I had become used to saying that multiple feelings could exist at once while being with someone. This had partly become a reassurance to the fact that they might bring up an anxiety and then, forget it the next time, embarrassed with love: ‘Oh everything’s actually really good.’ Not that I would ever berate them for such fluctuation; it’s the tightrope, I think, that many people walk during long-term relationships without necessarily threatening their security.
At first, I thought that this may be the case with Garner. So often she is holding herself in shape, steeling herself, warring with the feminine need to please, and all in what feels like real time. ‘In the bathroom I looked at myself in the mirror and thought: “If I don’t say something I’ll poison myself with faking.”’ But as the disintegration of her marriage takes over, she can think of nothing else; you watch as the bad days definitively take over the good. She writes a letter to V pouring out her heart, but he leaves it unopened on his desk. In bed, she holds the promise of a conversation to her chest. Then: ‘in a burst of savagery I bare my teeth and snatch at [his arm] like a dog, but miss. “What’s up?” “I was hoping you might mention my letter.”’
Becoming a two can be a brutal change.
The discovery of V’s true awfulness is both painful to read and drip fed so carefully that the pacing turns into something more like a novel. Garner’s chief charge is not the ‘event’ itself, but V’s narration of it, his manipulation of the facts, his confusion of his writerly role with his life: ‘You always told me ‘“she was just a friend”… and that I was just a jealous person. You gaslighted me.’ When V asks what this means, she snaps in her very Helen way: ‘Oh, go and look it up.’ Soon afterwards she has to go to Antarctica for a journalistic assignment, the best and worst timing. ‘Forgive me,’ she writes in the resulting essay. ‘I’m not here for the wildlife.’
Becoming a two can be a brutal change. From the beginning of her affair, Garner writes of how ‘desperately’ she misses sleeping alone: ‘I don’t think I’m a very nice person,’ she admits. But what she is getting at about long-term love is something deeper: it’s the dark terror of knowing someone so well that they also become strange to you; how the challenge of this re-knowing is both alluring and alienating; how the trouble comes when one person rescinds that challenge, is uninterested or unable or both. There’s an earth-tilting moment when, reading a proof of V’s novel, she realises she ‘understand[s] almost nothing about him, and he understands almost nothing about me. We have no shared experience.’ She reads on. When her collected non-fiction is published, V is encouraging but reads none of it: ‘his bookmark… is still right up near the front’. She notes its unbudging position for a few sorrowful weeks until she stops, unable to see this ‘complaint’ as anything but her own ego.
V’s crimes are far worse than ignoring her, though it was this lack of interest and attention that agonised me most. Nor is Garner perfect: at times she exasperated me. But it’s her humour, her soaring joyfulness that makes her so affecting to read. Playing Van Morrison’s song ‘Sweet Thing’, she cries so many tears ‘I had to mop them with a tea towel… I was young once; I was adventurous and sometimes I was happy.’ For some reason this line knocked the wind out of me. Her diaries are full of them.
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Image credit: Darren James, 2024.
Lucy Thynne works for the Arts desk at The Telegraph.
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