Book of the week

Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1, 1978-1987 by Helen Garner (Text, $37)

In an age of tweets and Facebook posts, the diary has changed form. While some readers might not consider a writer’s regular notes as something of interest, in reality our online world is nothing if not a mosaic of brief journal entries, where other lives are exposed in real time.

Helen Garner is a well-known Australian author of novels such as Monkey Grip, novellas, short

stories, and more recently controversial long-form journalism.

The First Stone, in 1995, about an incident of sexual harassment at a Melbourne University College, is still a fundamental book, impinging on many contemporary debates.

In Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief, Garner writes as an ‘‘involved observer’’ reporting a public event. She explores her own experiences and reactions in the trial of two young women students accused of murdering one of their boyfriends and in the case of a man who may have driven a ute into a

country dam to drown his three children.

In the Yellow Notebook, Diaries, Volume 1, 1978-1987, Garner makes public for the first time a formative period in her own life. It is a book of perceptions, fragments, and vividly captured emotions as a relationship grows and crashes and another begins. It is also the story of a writer growing in confidence and skill.

Beginning in Paris in 1978, when her novel Monkey Grip about the lives of central Melbourne students, actors, and drug addicts won the Australian National Book Council Award, Garner plunges the reader directly into her days. The

book is not signposted with footnotes or an introduction. Her life is revealed, one luminous glimpse after another.

Garner’s entries are short, seldom more than a half-page paragraph. They are often perception-based – what has just happened.

Few people are referred to by more than an initial. M is her young teenage daughter. In the beginning, there is also F, her husband, who is French. There are best friends and more than a few well-known Australian figures.

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 heartwrenching break-ups, growing friendships, tears, and celebrations. Garner’s relationship with her daughter becomes a pleasure to share.

Yellow Notebook is a life told in fragments, much like Garner’s fiction. It is thick with sensation and lived experience. If Garner’s judgments are sometimes hard, they are equally hard upon herself. It is an exemplary book.

The pleasure of the book is Garner’s eye – the momentary event, the instant’s feel, the texture of time.