How to End a Story: Collected Diaries

"This year, the surprise winner of Britain’s biggest nonfiction prize was Helen Garner’s How to End a Story — a collection of her diaries kept between 1978 and 1998. “I have to confess that, at first, I was a bit sceptical about this book,” admitted Robbie Millen, the critic and chair of this year’s judging panel, during an interview with Five Books editor Sophie Roell earlier this year. “It’s 800 pages… That’s a lot of words about someone who I didn’t know huge amounts about. But I found it absolutely gripping.” She is an excellent and observer of everyday life, he commented, but the real “pull-through” is her unsparing account of her two marriages, one of which begins as an affair and ends in violence. He added: “I love how novelists in particular—the really good ones—just go to places where mere mortals like me would never go, whether it’s baring their emotions or revealing their inner lives.”"

"Helen Garner is an Australian novelist, also very well-known for her nonfiction books—like This House of Grief , where she followed a famous Australian trial about a father who had killed his children. She’s never quite cracked the British market, but publishers have been reissuing a lot of her older books, like The Children’s Bach. I have to confess that, at first, I was a bit sceptical about this book. It’s 800 pages of her diaries from 1978 to 1998. That’s a lot of words about someone who I didn’t know huge amounts about. But I found it absolutely gripping. I suppose there are two elements that really appealed to me. The first one is that she’s just a brilliant observer of everyday life. The passages are short, a couple of paragraphs. It could be eavesdropping a conversation which amused her. It could be something about a book she’s read. Sometimes she just sees something on the street which appeals to her, and she puts it down on paper. And you think, ‘Yes, that’s exactly how things are.’ The other element to it—which, by the end, is the real pull-through—is her marriages. So when we first meet her, back in 1978, her second marriage is just coming to an end. Then midway through I think the second volume—it was originally published in three volumes—she meets a man. She calls him X (She usually just gives people initials). He is a married man who she begins an affair with and eventually marries. We see the car crash relationship develop, and by the end, it gets a little bit violent. It’s mainly violence against objects, luckily. But it comes to quite a dramatic end. I was reading it, and one of my colleagues had also read the book. Every day, I found myself coming into work saying, ‘You can’t believe what X has done now!’ It felt like being privy to very raw emotions. It surprises me that she hasn’t published it posthumously. Obviously, she’s edited it and shaped it, but there are parts where she is very unsparing of herself. There are some completely embarrassing moments, yet she puts it all out there. I love how novelists in particular—the really good ones—just go to places where mere mortals like me would never go, whether it’s baring their emotions or revealing their inner lives. Yes, I had that initial sensation of thinking, ‘Where is this going?’ but the moment I finished it, I wanted to read it again. I realized how brilliant it was and wanted to check all the things I’d missed. I thought at first there was no narrative shape to it, but once it reveals itself, it’s an extraordinary work of art. She’s a beautiful writer. It was interesting rereading it because all of her cleverness, her smart observations, flower again. There were all sorts of things that had entered the silt of my mind, were sitting under the surface, and reemerged. It’s a terrific book."

"The UK’s most prestigious nonfiction book prize is the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction , formerly known as the Samuel Johnson Prize. Books that win this prize are going to be highly accessible, well-written, and could be about almost anything. Last year, a book about the Japanese prisoner of war experience that was “part memoir, part science, part history” won , in previous years, we’ve seen books about subjects as broad as the Chernobyl disaster , the Beatles, North Korea and John Donne take home the £50,000 prize (browse the full list of winners here .) The judges for the prize change every year, so the book that wins in any particular year will tend to reflect the makeup of the judging panel and the dynamics between them. This year, the winner was completely unexpected—both to me and, based on my conversation with him, perhaps also to Robbie Millen, the literary editor of the Times, who was chair of the 2025 judging panel. How to End a Story is the collected diaries of Helen Garner , a talented Australian writer. The book of hers that has been recommended on Five Books is This House of Grief , about a father who stood accused of killing his children by driving them into a reservoir. How to End a Story is very different. It reads like little snippets, and the book is quite hard to get into, at least initially. But this is the story of a life, of a marriage, told without taking any prisoners and, as a result, gives a very unusual and unfiltered insight into what it is to be a human being. “It felt like being privy to very raw emotions,” Millen told me. “It surprises me that she hasn’t published it posthumously. Obviously, she’s edited it and shaped it, but there are parts where she is very unsparing of herself. There are some completely embarrassing moments, yet she puts it all out there.”"