by
Helen Garner
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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.”
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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.”
Falling in love with C was not gradual. Falling in love with C was encompassing, consuming, life-expanding. It was like ripping hunks from a loaf of fresh bread and stuffing them in my mouth. In those early days, he was a man frying little disks of sausage on a hot plate in a Paris garret, asking me to marry him. Making me laugh so hard I slipped off our red couch. Loving the smoked tacos we got from a tiny shack just north of Morro Bay. Pointing out backyard chickens from the garage we rented behind a surfer’s bachelor pad. Putting his hand on my thigh while I drank contrast fluid that tasted like bitter Gatorade, before a CT scan to find my burst ovarian cyst. Playing the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band on a road trip, putting a cinnamon bear on our rental car dashboard because it was our mascot, our trusty guide. Our thing. We had a thousand things, like everyone. But ours were only ours. Who will find them beautiful now?
In those early days, he was a man ordering room-service steak at the Golden Nugget after we said our vows in a Vegas wedding chapel at midnight. He was a man curled beside me watching our favorite obstacle-course program on TV, a man getting my face tattooed on his biceps, a man whispering in my ear at a crowded party.
He is still that man. I am still that woman. We have betrayed those tender people, but we still carry them around inside of us wherever we go.
My mother. After my parents split up, when I was eleven, it was just the two of us. On Sunday nights we watched Murder, She Wrote, eating bowls of ice cream side by side on the couch. She always solved the mystery by the second commercial break; she knew from the lost umbrella in the corner of the shot, or else from the fishy alibi that didn’t check out because the murderer used “he” to describe a female dentist. “Just got lucky,” she’d say. It wasn’t luck. It was her close attention to the details of the world, the same keen eye that kept track of every doctor’s appointment, every passing comment I’d made about a school project, a tiff with a friend; she always followed up, wondered how it went.
Her skin carried the sweet, clean scent of her soap—that blue tub of chilly white pudding that she rubbed across her high cheekbones. She baked loaves of fresh brown bread and gave me heels straight from the oven, still warm.
She helped me write down recipes in a little spiral-bound notebook of index cards so I could make us dinner once a week: sloppy joes with soy crumbles, or a casserole of pop-up biscuits and cream of mushroom soup. My economist father was on the other side of the country, or in his apartment across town, or in the sky. It was hard to keep track. He and I had dinner once a month. Sometimes more, sometimes less. He’d never had my biscuit casserole.
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When I met C, I was thirty years old. I wasn’t a child. But there was so much I didn’t know. I’d never made a choice I couldn’t take back. I was drowning in the revocability of my own life. I wanted the solidity of what you couldn’t undo.
C loved basketball sneakers and bodega snacks, drank soda rather than coffee. He was easily affronted and absolutely forthright. He was not afraid of hard work or a crisis; he was consolidated by difficulty. He always rooted for the underdog. He loved Lloyd Dobler, John Cusack’s character from Say Anything: the kickboxer wooing the beautiful valedictorian, standing beneath her window in a baggy beige blazer and a Clash T-shirt, hoisting his boombox high above his head.
The first time C and I talked about my eating disorder, a few weeks into our relationship, he asked me how much I’d weighed when I was sick. Partway through my response, he broke in to tell me how little his wife had weighed by the end of her life. The memory was so painful it cut through him, like a splinter breaking through the surface of his skin. He had no choice but to say it out loud. In that moment, and many others, everything I’d lived seemed trivial in relation to everything he’d survived.
Still, some part of me had wanted to finish my sentence.
Another part of me thought that making this man happy would be more meaningful than anything else I’d ever done. From early on, he said, “You are giving me another life.” Every time I felt a flicker of doubt, it seemed like a betrayal of this hope.
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This was life under the shadow of the question mark. I spent long, agonizing hours on the phone with my mother, explaining my uncertainty to her, hoping she could help me decide. She asked, “What is your gut telling you?” But the question didn’t help, because my gut told me conflicting things at once—that we were soulmates, and that we were doomed—and my gut wasn’t a voice to be trusted, anyway. Recovery had taught me this. My gut wanted to drink and drink and drink. My gut didn’t realize that no matter how much I drank, I’d still be thirsty.
By the time I met C, I was sick of listening to my gut. I was ready to bring in upper management. Upper management said I was done with waffling, done with going back and forth. Upper management told me not to listen to my doubts. They were only coaxing me back into a prior version of myself.
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