The writer Catherine Lacey once brilliantly described the difficulty of writing about experiences you’re still living as “trying to make a bed while you’re still in it,” but as I read Garner’s diaries, I kept thinking that perhaps not every bed needs to be made. Sometimes we want the unmade beds, with messy sheets and sprawled-out bodies stretching and spooning, the fossils of curled hairs on the pillow, the faint salt of dried sweat.

Far from reading like B-roll footage, these diaries feel magnificent and sui generis, beholden to no rhythms or logic but their own, simultaneously seductive and staggering, a blend of pillow talk, bar gossip, and eavesdropping on therapy. They offer an intoxicating, astute account of the deep emotional movements of Garner’s life over two decades—two marriages and divorces, the flowering of her literary career, and her daughter’s coming-of-age—but they always live in the weeds, built of the grain and texture of her days. No small part of their brilliance stems from their faith that there is no meaningful separation between these realms of inquiry: that reckoning with human purpose and the anguished possibilities of human love always happens within, and not above, the realm of “trivial” daily experience. Which is to say: in their form as well as their content, they reveal where meaning dwells in our lives (everywhere), and how we might excavate it. “In my heart,” Garner has said, “I always liked my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

When people talk about personal narrative as a literary form, there is almost always a bias toward the insights made available by hindsight. But what can you see as you are coming down the road? “Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it,” Garner has said, inviting us to consider the possibility that there’s not necessarily a direct correlation between time passed and insight gained, as if you will necessarily “know” the most about your own life at precisely the moment just before you die. You know things as you move through experience, and sometimes the fervent immediacy of this sort of knowing actually diminishes across time. Once you know how things play out, you cannot absolutely re-create all you felt inside of them: that sensation is gone for good. Garner’s diaries are full of this intimate entwining of knowing and feeling, like two lovers tangled up in the sheets of an unmade bed.

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 stunning Künstlerroman of middle age. Here is an artist expanding and evolving across the middle of her life, in thrilling and unexpected ways. Over and over again, we witness Garner reaching through various kinds of grief and frustration (divorce, artist’s block, maternal guilt) to keep falling in love with daily life, her family, her city, strangers on the streets and in the baths, finding in her art a well of power that cannot ever be taken from her. “Nothing can touch me,” she writes, in the midst of fighting with her second husband, because she feels close to “the power of work. Art, and the huge, quiet power it gives.”

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, supple and wry—but not huffy. And while it’s true that there’s nothing I would call an “overarching philosophy” spanning these diaries, they give us something far better, with a slyer and more inviting architecture: not overarching but subterranean, deftly emerging from the rough terrain of experience.

What are the tenets of this subversive, subterranean philosophy? It has more to do with cleaning the dishes, or making breakfast for a grandson, or sitting down for tea with a friend, than it does with the utterly silent lunches Garner recalls the composer Igor Stravinsky demanding from his family. At its core, this subterranean philosophy believes that the obligations and distractions of daily life are not distractions at all: they are the conduits through which we arrive at profundity; they are midwives of grace and insight. It believes that humility and surprise are the cornerstones of both rigorous self-knowledge and moral action. The more willing we are to be surprised by ourselves, other people, and experience, the more we are capable of honesty, discovery, care, and transformation. Garner feels a deep kinship with the nun who says, “I love intellectuals who hesitate.” She is fascinated by a man who keeps but doesn’t read his parents’ letters to each other: “Perhaps he doesn’t want to lose the state of having a secret from himself; or to reach the end of the mystery, the bottom of the bag.” One senses Garner doesn’t really believe in the bottom of the bag; instead, she believes in the generative understanding that she can’t ever fully understand herself. “What is the point of this diary?” she asks. “There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.”

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 friends in a village. On the drive she told us that the husband had had an affair. The wife had fought it, or sat it out. He had returned to her. ‘So,’ she said with a satisfaction that did not quite convince me, ‘she won.’ The air in the house was thick. The husband and wife did not look at each other. In the afternoon we walked halfway up a small mountain. An easy track. Chestnuts still bright with yellow leaves. At night the darkness and silence around the house frightened me.

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.

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?’

M ate a real egg from my sister’s chook. It was so rich that she retired to bed groaning and sobbing, and couldn’t go to school till 10.30: ‘I feel all eggy inside.’

To Dallas Brooks Hall to hear Roger Woodward play Chopin. A stiffly dramatic performance: some very controlled throwing up of the hands. I liked the music but his presence was so intellectual and contained that one might as well have been watching a movie. Little warmth; but in certain pieces his control seemed less rigid, and the left hand rolled almost sexually. In a cafe afterwards a man greeted two guys sitting at the other end of my table. He leaned over them with both hands on the table edge, stiff-armed as a detective, and said that he hadn’t liked the concert.

The Age asks me to review Beatrice Faust’s book Women, Sex and Pornography. I file a piece in dialogue form that I really enjoyed writing. They reject it. Would I please rewrite it as a straight review. Rage and contempt. Cutting potatoes and onions, I reflect on the pain of rejection, and on how little of it I’ve had to endure. I think of my CAE students and the way I cheerfully rip into their precious work. I could try to learn a lesson from their humility. I agree to rewrite.