Helen Garner, now in her early eighties, remains one of Australia’s most prominent, indeed unmissable, writers. It is forty-eight years since she published the autobiographical novel Monkey Grip (1977). Four further novels were followed by several short-story collections, three screenplays and copious journalism. Then, in her early fifties, she took a new direction into non-fiction, producing the highly controversial book The First Stone (1995), about a sex scandal at her alma mater, the University of Melbourne. Joe Cinque’s Consolation, which concerns a bizarre campus killing in Canberra, appeared in 2004. Last year, Garner wrote a brief book about ageing and her grandson’s football team. Just recently, in Sydney, there was an adaptation of her most recent novel, The Spare Room (2008), with Judy Davis playing the recognisable protagonist, Helen, who accommodates – fretfully and resentfully – a friend dying of cancer. Throughout it all, Garner has remained available to readers, festivals and journalists, offering a series of reliably confessional newspaper interviews. In a literary community not always noted for public candour, hers has been a career marked by unconditional frankness and risk-taking. 

Only in recent years, though, has Garner attracted a substantial international readership and reputation. Influential critics such as James Wood and Ben Lerner have introduced her to American readers. In the United Kingdom, even Nigella Lawson finds Garner acute, rigorous and, that dullest of compliments, ‘pitch-perfect’, which really doesn’t do justice to this consummate stylist.

It was widely known for decades that Garner kept a diary (she has been open about having destroyed an early one, deeming it boring and self-obsessed). The fate of the rest of the diaries appeared uncertain until 2019, when, unexpectedly, she published Yellow Notebook: Diaries, Volume I, 1978–1987. Two other