How to End a Story
by Helen Garner
Summary
A selection of diary entries spanning the 1990s in which the Australian writer Helen Garner records the slow collapse of her third marriage alongside the daily textures of a working writer's life — friendships, reading, the difficulty of finding the right words, and the emotional cost of paying close attention to the world. Garner writes without self-protection or retrospective tidying, and the result is a document of unusual honesty about desire, failure, ageing, and the discipline that literary work requires. The first diary collection to win the prize, it confirmed Garner's standing as one of the essential prose writers in the English language, and she became, at 82, the oldest winner in the prize's history.
Historical Context & Significance
The first diary collection to win the prize; Garner, at 82, became the oldest winner in its history.