I helped F’s journalist friend spackle the walls in his new apartment. I was afraid he’d scorn me for my ignorance of politics but when I happened casually to mention Ibsen he looked embarrassed and said, ‘Qui ça?’
I read the paper and doors open in my head like those in a cuckoo clock. I had forgotten why people read papers. You learn things. Ideas come to you. Connections strike off each other with ringing blows or slot together like carpenters’ joints.
In Toulouse our hostess made a dormitory of her bedroom and she, M and I slept comfortably in a row. All the sheets and towels, from her trousseau sixteen years ago, are embroidered with her initials. At about 4 pm I remembered that it was my birthday. She took us out of the city to stay with some …
At one point near the end of their marriage, Garner writes, “V says that women’s writing, ‘lacks an overarching philosophy,’ ” and records her own brisk reply: “I don’t even know what this means. Also, I don’t care.” Tonally, this is pure Garner: colloquial and self-possessed, jaunty and winking, s…
The Künstlerroman, a bildungsroman that focuses on the development of an artist, is a genre traditionally associated with youth and coming of age, but anyone who has ever tried to make art knows the process of becoming an artist never ends. In Garner’s diaries, we find, among other things, a stunni…
