“I was utterly in [Garner’s] hands. . . . This is one for the introverts — the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status. Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest, and economical; take it or leave it, in the Australian manner.”
—Dwight Garner, New York Times Book Review
“How to End a Story is among the best things she has written . . . . the real value of this collection is the opportunity it affords us to see the domestic, ordinary, everyday world through Garner’s eyes.”
—Lance Richardson, Washington Post
“Here is someone who knows how to strike, softly, a killing blow. As with the best Garner, however, the main achievement of the entry isn’t what it says: it’s how much it doesn’t say. . . . In her diary—more so even than in her fiction and nonfiction—we find a way to survive that feels less like a riddle and more like a recipe we can follow.”
—Josh Billings, Los Angeles Review of Books
“[Garner] thinks better than almost anyone.”
—W
“In dreams and treasured quotations, conversations and therapy sessions, Garner uncovers the texture of minutiae, the vibration of grand thoughts, and the aftertaste of defeat. By the end, Garner is scorched, but like a spore rejuvenated by a cleansing fire, she emerges reanimated. Offering intoxicating insight into the creative mind, Garner’s diaries will tantalize the voyeur and inspire fellow visionaries who embrace such journeys of discovery.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“[Garner’s diaries] really are a gold mine . . . The candidness with which she scrutinises her own very human prejudices, sympathies and sentimentalities brings a deeper, more interestingly fraught complexity to the horror stories about which she writes. Perhaps because she’s long been such a presence on the page, the diaries feel less of a revelation and more of a continuation of one of today’s finest writer’s remarkable life’s project.”
—Lucy Scholes, Financial Times
“In some ways, the diaries are the apotheosis of [Garner’s] entire career, and the most exciting thing she has ever published.”
―LitHub
“Magnificent . . . During an acute bout of uncertainty, [Garner] confides, “Each morning I set out for my office weak with fear. I will never be a great writer.” Sorry to break the news, but she was wrong.”
—Michael Magras, Shelf Awareness
“No-one today would question Garner’s significance, her intellectual heft, her bankability or her right to the prodigious space she occupies in Australian letters . . . A monumental achievement.”
—Harper’s Bazaar
“The sensory nature of her observations is glorious.”
—Guardian
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