Helen Garner

The private diaries of one of Australia's greatest living writers, the much loved, fearless and fierce Helen Garner.

Diaries Volume I 1978–1987

Yellow Notebook

Jesse Morley

"Fear—of being drawn to another man whose phlegmatic nature will limit and distort mine—or for whose sake I will limit and distort myself."

It’s refreshingly intimate to read a text that hasn’t been crafted for an audience. You can no longer indulge in speculation at the author’s intention—instead you’re released to gaze at the fragmentary insights, de-focusing your vision (as for a Magic Eye), and marvelling as a picture of a life emerges.

I recognised the brutality of unchecked self-criticism as it presented itself here. Garner deals constantly with criticism of her work and her worth as a writer, but remains her own harshest critic.
  I am the only person in the world who carries round an inventory of my crimes. Everyone else is busy with their own.

The dreams were exquisitely sketched—Garner’s concise imagery almost lifting them off the page. She addresses this economy of language directly at one point:

  When I was not yet ‘a writer’ I used to write colossal, twenty-page letters to people. Now I communicate on the backs of postcards. This thought made me feel quite cheerful, as if I had imperceptibly, over years, and not by the exercise of will, rechannelled wasted energy into a more useful course—but now I mess with the taps, I keep them turned off, or let just a tiny trickle escape. 
Her tone moves between harshly-self-deprecating and ebullient-at-the-simple-pleasures-of-life in the space of a single page, giving the reading experience an illuminating ‘zoomed out’ feeling. These juxtapositions don’t, as one might expect, have a trivialising effect, but rather demonstrate how the deep range of experiences, emotions, and relationships—from the seemingly insignificant to the most profound—work together to construct the pageant of a life lived fully.

Detracting from the experience for me was a creeping sense of middle-class snobbery. Garner spends a lot of time contemplating articles of high culture (classical music, theatre, art, etc) while characterising the less fortunate as “brain-damaged” and “without much of a handle on language.” I wondered at certain points whether it was courageous to publish judgements and impressions that, read in today’s climate, appear politically insensitive. I’m still unsure.

Also fatiguing for me were the number of French phrases recorded, but when I took the time to look them up, I appreciated their inclusion.
I like people when they are in a great mass, thousands of lonely or rather solitary blobs, each one with ‘le front barré de souci’. (The forehead crossed out with worry)Finally, Garner’s call to spirituality—her allusion to a Mighty Force—distanced me from her inner world. Maybe in my late 30s it will resonate with me more.

Yellow Notebook Diaries Volume I 1978–1987

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