Author(s): Helen Garner

Literature | Australia

Finally, Helen Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Recorded with frankness, humour and steel-sharp wit, these accounts of her everyday life provide an intimate insight into the work of one of Australia's greatest living writers. Yellow Notebook, Diaries Volume I, in this new paperback edition, spans about a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip.It will delight Garner fans and those new to her work alike.

Review: '[Garner's] writing expresses a hard-won grace. It brings you closer to the world, and shows you how to love it.' * Monthly *
'Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses...her unillusioned eye makes her clarity compulsive.' * James Wood, New Yorker *
'Garner, in everything she writes, is an indelible stylist, a shaper of events, a distiller of meaning.' * Morag Fraser, Australian Book Review *
'On the page, Garner is uncommonly fierce, though this usually has the effect on me of making her seem all the more likable. I relish her fractious, contrarian streak - she wears it as a chef would a bloody apron - even as I worry about what it would be like to have to face it down.' * Guardian *
'Yellow Notebook reveals the bewildered quest, the stubborn orneriness and vanity of a soul forever journeying it knows not where. It has the power of great fiction that the finest poetry has.' * Saturday Paper *
'We are once again able to witness one of Australia's greatest writers at her most raw, unedited, and brilliant...Yellow Notebook is both entirely ordinary, and completely transfixing.' * Good Reading *
'The pleasure of the book is Garner's eye - the momentary event, the instant's feel, the texture of time. This is not to say that there is no story - far from it. Yellow Notebook is often rich in anecdotes. It is a book of heart-wrenching break-ups, growing friendships, tears, and celebrations. Garner's relationship with her daughter becomes a pleasure to share...It is an exemplary book.' * Stuff.co.nz *

Author Biography:

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier's Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and in 2020 she received the Lloyd O'Neill Award for her outstanding contribution to the industry. Her books include Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, The First Stone, Joe Cinque's Consolation, The Spare Room, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, True Stories, Yellow Notebook, One Day I'll Remember This and How to End a Story.