Helen Garner Longlist Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-fiction 2025?  
I admit I’m bewildered . How do they even know I exist?

What made you decide to publish your diaries when you did? 
Getting old, seeing all the notebooks stacked on the shelves, flipping through them and thinking, ‘Hey there’s some good stuff in here!’ 

What do you hope readers will take away from your book? 
About a million juicy observations large and small that I’ve been storing up for a long time, waiting for them to find their moment. Also, a lot of laughs. At the pure fabulous ridiculousness of daily life, and at what Nick Hornby says football fandom provides: the knowledge of ‘the brevity of a glorious moment, the futility of all human endeavour.’

The diaries are deeply personal, touching on marriage, motherhood, menopause, and self-doubt. Were there entries you hesitated to share publicly? 
There was plenty of stuff about certain other people that I decided to leave out, things that might have pointlessly hurt them or betrayed their confidences. But I thought it might be a good exercise to be as brazen about my own experiences as I could stand. And this turns out to be one of things that readers tell me they like about the diaries. It’s a way of connecting with strangers. The opposite of loneliness.  

If you could say something to your younger self, what would it be? 
Don’t whinge. Don’t use too many adverbs. And hold on to your belief that the events of  daily life have value and will always be worth recording.  

You once wrote that you might burn all your diaries. What changed your mind? 
I did burn quite a few of them, in the back yard, about twenty years ago. I hadn’t expected it to be such hard work. The covers are stubborn and need to be ripped and torn and vigorously  poked with a stick to make them really flame up.  I stopped burning around 1977 when they started to become interesting: that is, when I started to like them instead of finding them mortifying and embarrassing. I liked seeing how a narrative arc had formed itself spontaneously, and being able to see my sentences building up muscle, from all those hours of what is essentially practice.  

Do you see this book as a closing chapter, or are there more diaries waiting to be shared?  
I’ve got heaps more, but somehow I think I’ve published enough.

Did you ever consider editing or fictionalising parts of the diaries, or was preserving their rawness important to you?  
Rawness, yes.  I did edit them, of course, in the sense of trimming off boring repetitions and irrelevancies. And over the years I have used chunks of them in novels – for scenes I needed but didn’t know how to invent . But they weren’t really all that raw—technically, that is— because when I write in my diary I am not wasting my time by simply jotting down what happened. I am trying to write as well as I can, to make my sentences clean and springy, and never to bore myself.

If you could describe your book in three words, what would they be?   
Record. Of. Soul.