How to End a Story

This is the complete run of Garner's Australian diaries, 1978 to 1998, previously published there as three separate volumes, now landing in the US as one 800-page document of a working writer's actual days: money worries, her mother, and above all a long, disintegrating marriage to fellow novelist Murray Bail, coded in the diaries as 'V.' What distinguishes it from typical literary-diary fare is Garner's refusal to soften her own behavior or tidy the account into a redemption arc; the entries read as unmediated as bar gossip or an overheard therapy session. The title itself signals her real subject: not endings imposed on a life, but the discipline of recognizing where a chapter of one actually stops.