#121: I like reading diaries of other writers

Yesterday, I had an insatiable desire to read something good. Something that could take me in its arms and rock me as a mother would. I needed the words that make me feel that I am in the safest place in the world.

So, I typed two words on the Google search bar - Helen Garner - my go-to author whenever I feel the need to feed my soul. Like I would go for chicken soup on wintery nights.

An article in the Guardian caught my eye. I opened it hoping to find an interview where she speaks candidly. But no, it was Helen herself, having a conversation with herself.

She wrote:

“When I was young, I liked writing. It was the only thing I was any good at, and I wanted to do it all the time. But I knew I would never be able to write a book.

A book, back in the 50s and 60s, meant a novel. Novels were all I knew about. I’d read hundreds of them. But I thought you couldn’t write one unless you had an “idea” that you wanted to “express.” Writers, I learned at school and university, had plots and characters, and “themes.” I didn’t have any of those or know how to get them. All I had was a million details. I couldn’t see how it would ever be possible to make a container for the cascade of interesting stuff that poured past and through me each day."

But I liked pushing a pen, so I went on taking notes of the cascade as a way of keeping my head while it rushed on by, trying to capture bits in good sentences with grammar and punctuations, to get into words in a way that relieved me. That’s how I started to keep a diary, and I have never stopped.”

If you haven’t lived in Australia, you probably haven’t heard of Helen Garner. Born in 1942, she was a secondary school teacher until 1972, when she was dismissed for answering her students’ questions about sex.

She had to start writing journalism for a living. Her works have always caused controversy.

When her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out, in 1977, the critics said “she’s published her diary.’ But she was only portraying the way the world had presented itself to her. The novel was about a woman who falls in love with a man and gets caught in the web of his addictions as he moves between loving her and leaving her, between his need for her and broken promises. This intense dance of loving and trying to let go was perhaps what Helen was experiencing in her own marriage. The novel now is regarded as a masterpiece.

Then again, when she wrote The First Stone a book about the sexual harassment complaint launched by two young women students at Melbourne University, she was called anti-feminist by the critics, for supporting the man in question. The book caused a social media storm. But it was a brave approach, a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamics between men and women something she observed in her everyday life.

Pretty much everything she has ever published was drawn from this compulsion to watch and witness and record. She is known for the outstanding accuracy of her observations, the intensity of her passion, and her radar-sure humor. And according to Ed Campion of Bulletin, she writes the best sentences in Australia. And it is all due to her diary-writing habit.

In her own words:

“When I sit down to write something for publication, I’ll do anything to avoid the desk. I drag the chain for half a day at a time. I eat biscuits or put on the washing or vacuum the mats or lie on them and curse my fate. To write with conscious purpose I have to corral myself, to buckle on a harness before I can even start."

But every night before I go to sleep, and every morning when I open my eyes, I pick up my diary and my fountain pen, make a note of the date and time, and start writing. I never, ‘don’t want to.’ I never ‘don’t feel like it’ or ‘can’t be bothered.’ I just do it, sitting up in bed, and when I’ve been writing for 10 minutes or maybe an hour and feel like stopping, I stop - because I’m not writing for any reader other than myself. During these hours of peculiar solitude, in conversation with myself and no one else, I am free.”

Helen has a unique way of being present in her novels. I had a hard time believing that her latest one, The Spare Room, was a work of fiction. Published in 2008, it is about a three-week visit from a dying friend. Helen appears in the story as a character to whom all the things are happening. The protagonist becomes the secondary character and she pulls it off so beautifully that you don’t even notice.

In an interview, Garner told a critic, “It is morally a novel, even though it’s very closely based on my real experience of those three terrible weeks in my life. By calling it a novel I’m saying: this is not a memoir, this is not nonfiction, this is a novel and there will be things in here that are invented, that didn’t really happen, and I’m going to take… every sort of liberty I need to take in order to turn it into the sort of book I want it to be.”

Yet her best work is coming to the public now, in the form of her diaries. She says, “I always like my diary better than anything else I wrote.”

Yesterday, I ordered all three of them - Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This, and How to End a Story

There is another reason I like reading diaries of good writers (I loved David Sedaris’ Theft By Finding too). To learn how to capture day-to-day happenings and turn them into works of art.

Helen has an uncanny ability to capture little things such as a dream she had of a bear in the back seat of a car, a broken umbrella in a bin, a rat in a kitchen, or a bird that sings all night in a park all night.

That’s the kind of writing that comforts me. That’s the kind of writing I want to be able to do.

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Ilona Goanos thinks I am a bot. I lament, I am not. If I was I would not be so much behind with the NaNoWriMo challenge. But it feels good to be mentioned in her newsletter.

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This week I was shocked to hear about the death of Julie Powell, the author of Julie and Julia. I learned about it from Elissa Altman’s newsletter A Poor Man’s Feast. Julie, not Julia. Julie was only 49,

If you don’t know about Julie Powell, she attempted to cook every recipe in a classic Julia Child cookbook and documented the effort in a popular blog that became a best-selling book and a hit movie.

This world is a poorer place without you, Julie.

That’s all from me this week.

Neera Mahajan

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