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In early January, the Australian author Helen Garner decided to cut back an unruly bush in her garden. Garner lives in a Melbourne suburb in the adjoining house to her daughter, son-in-law, three grandchildren, some chickens and a dog. The family were away at the beach for the holidays and Garner found herself alone, in an off-kilter frame of mind. She’s 82, her beach days are over, but she felt her family’s absence. Her grandchildren were growing up, the youngest now 18. Garner realised she was on the brink of a loneliness not felt since she’d moved to live alongside them 20 years ago, after the end of her third and final marriage, to the author Murray Bail.
Missing her family, feeling adrift, she went outside with some secateurs and “pruned the shit” out of the bush in such frenzied bursts that the next day, when she looked out of the window, she saw a scene of devastation, barely a leaf left. “I don’t know if it’ll grow back,” she said, aghast and delighted at her own violence. The attack wasn’t senseless: Garner knew the particular catharsis it might contain. “Being willing to destroy is very important, I think,” she said. “To destroy something in a purposeful and orderly way, not in a hysterical way.” She paused, to plot the pleasures of her next sentence. “To be out there with a sharp-edged blade.”
Garner is one of the most revered and beloved writers in Australia. She became famous from the moment she published her autobiographical first novel, Monkey Grip, about living with her daughter in commune-style houses in Melbourne in the 1970s. Subsequent novels, such as The Children’s Bach and The Spare Room, are slim, taut books, charting the interior dramas of family and friendship. Her nonfiction, written in the second half of her career, has mostly been reported from courtrooms: Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief are both accounts of long murder trials.
Garner has never followed a single course. Her most recent book is The Season, the story of her youngest grandson’s Aussie rules football team. It starts like this: “I pull up at the kerb. I love this park they train in. I must have walked the figure-of-eight round its ovals hundreds of times, at dawn, in winter and summer, to throw the ball for Dozer, our red heeler – but he’s buried now, in the back yard, under the crepe myrtle near the chook pen.” Garner has often said that her ambition was to write prose that doesn’t read like writing. She writes, instead, as if the reader were her friend and confidante, party to her most candid thoughts. Her great foe is pomposity. She can change register from elegiac to colloquial – death to a chook pen – in a single line. Her prose is hard-worked, thick with detail, but its effect is one of bracing immediacy. Both the source and purest example of this style is her diary, which she has written most days of her life. At her editor’s suggestion, the diaries were published in three parts in Australia between 2019 and 2021. She considers them her greatest work of all.
In Australia, in this late, grand phase, Garner’s reputation is assured. Her 80th birthday was celebrated in a series of special events and she has been given multiple awards, including an Australian Society of Authors medal for her outstanding contribution to Australian literature. (She is adored to the extent that her publisher recently posted her shopping list – apples, pears, sardines, tinfoil – on their blog because they had so often heard readers say that they would read anything she wrote.) But she has always “ruffled a lot of feathers”, said her Australian editor, Jane Pearson. Monkey Grip, with its unguarded depictions of sex and heroin addiction, provoked distaste in conservative circles and attracted accusations of self-indulgence. Later, The First Stone, a journalistic investigation into a sexual assault case against a university professor, angered some feminists who felt Garner had betrayed their cause. “She’s always pissed people off in Australia for such a variety of reasons it’s almost comic,” said a friend, the author Tim Winton. “Too much of a sloppy hippy. And yet insufficiently submissive to the orthodoxies of her times.”
Beyond Australia, Garner is strangely under-read. Fellow authors and critics have long respected her work – James Wood wrote an appreciation for the New Yorker in 2016, Merve Emre followed in the London Review of Books in 2019 – and yet her books remain relatively unknown. “Perhaps it’s something to do with Garner’s Australianness – the very Australian focus of her work,” Wood suggested in an email. (All of Garner’s books have been set in her country.) “Don’t you think if, say, the New Yorker had serialised Garner’s book about the trial, This House of Grief, and treated it like a prestigious new Janet Malcolm work, she’d be much better known? New York, for sure, is very parochial in that way.”
As if to counter the charge, Pantheon Books in the US and Weidenfeld & Nicholson in the UK acquired Garner’s backlist in 2023. Lettice Franklin, the British editor, won the rights in a five-way auction. Last year, Weidenfeld republished Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief. In March, her diaries will be published in the UK and US in one 830-page volume, called How to End a Story, covering two decades from 1978 to 1998. The decision to gather them into one book reflects their artistry as a single cohesive work and turns their publication into a literary event. For Garner, international recognition is a boon but not the pinnacle of her career. “I have never once sensed that Helen cared two hoots about overseas publication,” said another friend, the Booker-shortlisted novelist Charlotte Wood.
Being published abroad requires an author to travel. Last year, Garner quietly hoped she might not have to come to the UK on a book tour for the launch of her backlist, preferring to stay in Melbourne. Her interactions with the British literary scene have often been salted with insecurity and irritation. In her diaries, she describes awkwardly sidling up to Ian McEwan and the poet James Fenton at an Australian literary festival in the 90s; Fenton told her how to make stuffing for a chicken while McEwan talked about having piano lessons. At a party her former British publisher held for her in London in 1990, Garner felt so out of place she went to hide in another room where she discovered another solitary woman, who turned out to be the novelist Margaret Drabble.
Beneath the self-effacing anecdotes lies a pointed lack of concern about British opinion. “She was of the first generation that didn’t kiss imperial arse,” said Winton. In the 80s, he added, British and American publishers “were still asking Australian writers for glossaries, as if we were writers in translation”. Most Australian writers, said Wood, were used to being either ignored by the wider world or rejected by publishers for being too Australian or not Australian enough, lacking the requisite stereotypes: “No red dirt or kangaroos.”
In the 80s, Garner lived in Paris for 18 months and felt a profound, existential isolation. “It made me realise in the long run where I belonged,” she told me. “I’ve never been the kind of Australian writer who can’t wait to get out.” The opposite, then, of an author like Shirley Hazzard, for whom Australian suburbia was a subject of derision. Melbourne and its suburbs provide not just the setting of all Garner’s work, but also its sensibility: a determined unpretentiousness and a love of the way communities gather, whether around a kitchen table or the local football team. When she lived in Sydney during her third marriage, Garner deplored how her neighbours never said hello to each other. She longed to return to Melbourne and hang a washing line in her back garden. (Laundry – in particular, sheets, pillowcases and the pleasure of a freshly made bed – is a constant background song in Garner’s work.) She will defend Melbourne’s suburbs with a ferocity, that note of violence, that runs through much of her work. In a 2011 essay, she described being driven around the city with the English poet Christopher Logue and passing a sign for the suburb Moonee Ponds. “From the front passenger seat rose a drawling, highly educated Pommy voice, ‘I say … what’s a Moonee Pond?’” Garner selected her weapon: “The way he picked up the word in ironic tweezers made me want to seize him from my seat in the back and garotte him.”
Garner has written her diary morning and evening in ring-bound notebooks since she was a teenager. She was born in 1942 and grew up the eldest of six children in a middle-class household in Geelong, a coastal town south-west of Melbourne. At grammar school, the headteacher assumed that Garner would go to Melbourne University. Her parents, who hadn’t gone to university, went along with the idea: “They didn’t know what they were supposed to do if you’ve got a smart kid.” She studied English and French and came out with a third (“I went off the rails and started drinking a lot”). In 1968, aged 25, she married her first husband, Bill Garner, and then had a daughter, Alice. They separated after three years and Garner moved with Alice into a series of shared houses in Melbourne that formed the basis of Monkey Grip. To write the novel, she would drop Alice at a creche, take her diaries to the library and translate them into fiction. “You have a second go at the material,” she said. “I didn’t write anything new. I just hacked and aerated.”
Writing the diaries honed Garner’s concise style and pitiless self-examination. They also trained her eye. Garner’s gaze roams widely, though it rarely falls on major events. When she looked to see what she’d written about the collapse of the Australian government in 1975, considered the greatest constitutional crisis in the country’s history, she found no mention at all. Instead, it is the everyday and particular that catches Garner’s attention: the sharp shame of being told by a friend that a shirt doesn’t suit her, the hollowing grief of a child leaving home, the “large soft lump of shit” that her grandson deposited on her piano stool. The overall impression is of uncompromising honesty. No one is spared, least of all herself.
You cannot always trust Garner’s version of herself, however. She can be self-disparaging to the point of masochism. In the diaries, she berates herself for her laziness, for the fact she’ll never be a great writer, for her limitations as a mother and a wife. She describes her appearance variously as “starched” or “scraggy-haired”: “Women like me walk as fast as they can, with the aim of becoming a blur.” When I asked her how she felt about her body now, she crowed: “Oh, it’s a bloody horror show!” and then told a story about a French teacher at school who had deep wrinkles that ran down from either side of her mouth to her chin, in which bits of food gathered while she ate. By now, she was gently convulsing with laughter. “I have to be really careful about that sort of thing.”
Garner has a heart-shaped face, fair skin patterned with thin, spider-web lines around her eyes and mouth, and grey, feathery hair cut short. Photographs of Garner share none of the mythmaking imagery of, say, Joan Didion or Susan Sontag. On the cover of her essay collection, Everywhere I Look, Garner stands on a street next to her dog and an assortment of strangers – a man pushing his bike, a woman on her phone. She is an ordinary person among ordinary people, which is precisely the position from which she writes. Her relentless self-interrogation is a way of dismantling the idea of the writer as someone special, separate or aloof. She reserves a particular disdain for the author who thinks himself superior. She once watched Melvyn Bragg interview Martin Amis. “If you don’t think you’re the best, you’re not really doing it,” said Amis. Garner: “I wanted to dong him with a bat.”
Beneath the disarming self-deprecation, a deeper sense of inferiority has pestered Garner throughout her life. “I don’t think I opened my mouth in four years at uni, I thought of myself as such a dingbat,” she said. She remembered a conversation she once had with her third husband, Murray Bail. “I said casually that I feel like I’m a very small piece of shit, and he looked at me with surprise and said: ‘What? Is that how you feel about yourself?’ And I said: ‘Yeah, I think I’m very small.’” Garner had presumed everyone felt like her, at least slightly. Bail replied: “I’m actually pretty pleased with the shape of myself.” Years later, when Garner told this story at an event, the interviewer asked how long the marriage had lasted and the room erupted in laughter.
In their raw form, Garner’s diaries were never intended for publication. Years ago, she burned multiple early volumes in a bonfire in her back yard – decades of writing, including the notebooks on which Monkey Grip was based. She had the novel as a version of that time and she was unimpressed by the rest. “I read back and thought: ‘Jeez this stuff is boring.’” But after brief extracts from her surviving diaries were printed in Everywhere I Look in 2016, Garner’s publisher, Michael Heyward at Text, proposed publishing the whole lot as a book. “And I freaked! I said that’s not possible,” said Garner. The diaries involve a Knausgaardian level of self-exposure, and include intimate details of her parents, sisters, friends, lovers, husbands and children. “I didn’t think it would be too revealing of me. It was other people. Things that would hurt or enrage them, or just pointlessly wound them.”
But in the months after her conversation with Heyward, Garner started going over the material with a fresh eye. She began to see how an edited version of the diaries could begin during her lonely stint in Paris as her second marriage was ending. She also discovered a propulsive narrative arc, charting a 20-year period from the beginning of her affair with Bail in the late 80s, their marriage and the relationship’s eventual, brutal collapse in 1998. That particular story would have all the hallmarks of Garner’s fiction: a small cast, a mostly domestic setting and a series of unsettling scenes of extreme and often violent rupture.
If inclined to write about themselves, most authors put out a memoir: a carefully crafted version of the self. Authentic, day-to-day diaries – such as Virginia Woolf’s – tend to be published posthumously. Not many writers press print on years of personal notebooks while they’re still alive. Garner had to establish some principles. She notified close friends and family of her decision to publish. “The ones I cared most about said to me: ‘Feel free, go ahead, I trust you.’” She permitted herself to edit, but not rewrite. There could be no sugar-coating. Ultimately, she came to a moral position. “The only way it’s ethically doable is if you bring to bear on yourself the same amount of sharp, biting criticism and examination of your own foolishness or cruelty or harshness or indifference,” she said. “It just seems like a fair deal.”
Garner’s longtime hero, the American nonfiction author and New Yorker journalist Janet Malcolm, would have relished scrutinising the terms of this deal. I doubt she’d have thought it fair. In Malcolm’s view, the writer of nonfiction has an exploitative power over their subject. No matter what high-minded justifications the writer claims for their work, such writing is almost always an act of “treachery”, morally indefensible, in which the subject is the victim, duped to furnish a story. Even if a writer like Garner exposes and punishes themselves as much as anyone else, it is still her version and her choice alone to publish.
Malcolm’s influence is detectable throughout Garner’s nonfiction, most obviously in the lure of the courtroom and her interest in criminal psychology. (Garner is fond of saying that “as soon as a dead body appeared in my work, the windows and doors opened”.) But Malcolm also revealed a new way of writing. When Garner read The Silent Woman, Malcolm’s book on Sylvia Plath and her biographers, published in 1994, she was struck by Malcolm’s fearlessness and how she used psychoanalytic methods to locate meaning in the way someone cooked a lasagne or decorated their house. Garner, who had psychoanalytic psychotherapy during her third marriage, thought: “OK, well, I’m going to let it rip too.” She began to include observations in her books that she would previously have dismissed as illegitimate, the micro-interactions that revealed more about a person than their words. In an interview with a professor for The First Stone, Garner kept helping herself to biscuits in a jar on the table until he moved the jar out of her reach. She found the moment funny and full of subtle meaning, the way it communicated the power struggle between her and her subject. Under Malcolm’s influence, it became material.
Garner met Malcolm once in the early 90s, at a party while she was teaching in New York. She found her hero in the basement, sitting on a chair with a baby on her lap. The way the baby was positioned made it look as if Malcolm and the baby’s heads were stacked on top of each other, like some kind of surrealist sculpture. Garner burst out laughing, then awkwardly introduced herself. “I didn’t know what to say,” she recalled. She wanted to say thank you, and that she’d learned so much from reading her, but never got the chance, “because the door bursts open and in strides this big noisy New York intellectual woman whose name I’ve forgotten and says: ‘Darling Janet!’, and blows the whole thing out of the water, so I just kind of turned and went into a slump.”
Garner tells the story in typical fashion: comic, self-deprecating, describing herself at the edges of grandeur but excluded from its inner circle. She encountered Malcolm more directly on the page. Malcolm had unfavourably reviewed The First Stone in the New Yorker. Garner hadn’t minded, delighted that her idol had even read the book. Years later, she in turn reviewed Malcolm’s book Iphigenia in Forest Hills, about a murder trial. “I thought: ‘Gee this is a dog’s dinner up the front.’” Garner briefly wrestled with how honest to be in her review, then said precisely what she thought. Afterwards, she received an email from Malcolm, thanking her. “And I thought, that’s big of her. Some woman comes up from Australia and says your book’s a dog’s dinner, and she took it right on the chin.”
Garner’s conversational style is remote from Malcolm’s cool distance. (It is hard to imagine Malcolm using the phrase “dong him with a bat”.) “I haven’t got any theory you see. That’s the difference between her and me. She was way more highly educated than I am.” Yet it is Garner’s directness, unburdened by abstraction, that gives her work its power. In This House of Grief, Garner recounts the trial of Robert Farquharson, a man charged with killing his three sons by driving them into a lake and letting them drown in the car while he escaped. In court, Garner is open to every emotional reverberation. She notes the muffled screams of the boys’ mother, the traumatised expressions of the jury, the abject slump of Farquharson’s shoulders. She does not absent herself from the material – she is stricken by it. She has often said that in court she discovered the work she felt she was born to do: her observational precision and acute sensitivity working in concert. In one of our conversations, she recalled how Bail would tell her she cared only about feelings. “And I thought: ‘Well, what else is there?’”
Garner’s pivot to nonfiction in the mid-90s, during her marriage to Bail, was a form of surrender: a way of “shifting off the turf where we could be rivals”. Bail, a respected novelist but without Garner’s broad fame, considered the novel the superior form. Their decade together was governed by the monastic conditions he demanded for his work. Garner was not allowed to be in the apartment while he was writing or have her daughter or any family to stay. In the diaries, she counted her losses: “No piano, no holidays, no weekends, no outings … No singing no dancing no swimming. No children. No noise.”
Garner is an extrovert, thirsty for interaction. She starts up conversations with strangers as she travels around Melbourne. She likes to play the ukulele, to dance, to turn up music loud. Winton told me about a “classic day with HG” – they attended church, mocked the minister, wept at the altar, then went home where Garner lay on the bed and declared that his toddler son had “an arse like a porn star!” His favourite photo of Garner captures her laughing. She writes laughter constantly in her work: pissing herself, doubled over, tears pouring, laughing her head off. One of her many frustrations with Bail was his inability to understand what she called the moral value of fun. To her friends, it was obvious she was losing essential parts of herself in the relationship. “There were some dark years for Helen,” said Winton.
In the diaries, when Garner discovers Bail is having an affair, she goes berserk (her word). She hurls soup, coffee cups and butter around the kitchen, cuts up an Armani scarf he’d given her and tries to destroy a blue straw hat belonging to Bail’s lover by punching it in the crown, “but it keeps popping back into shape”. Then she takes the proof copy of “his fucking novel” and repeatedly stabs it with his Mont Blanc fountain pen until the pen’s nib breaks and twists into a golden knot. She squashes his cigars into some beetroot soup in the sink and then finishes the job on the hat, cutting it into strips and putting one in each of “his big ugly black suede shoes”. She leaves him a note: “Don’t you know that being lied to makes people crazy?”
The violence was wild and uncontrolled, but it is written and edited into the tightest prose. Published 20 years after the events, the diaries are like a mafia revenge killing, held back until the target could not possibly suspect he was still at risk. Before they were published in Australia, Garner found herself awake at 2am, panicked. “The person of course I felt the most anxious about was my third husband,” she told me. “I thought he was going to be exposed, and our marriage and all its dissatisfactions and the awful means by which it was dismantled.”
Shortly before publication, Garner showed some of her close friends and family extracts from the diary. Not Bail, though, with whom she has no contact. In the final version, she names people with a single initial as a form of disguise. (One reviewer wrote of the frenzied speculation among readers over their identities.) For friends, the process was fraught. “When you know someone well and love them, and you see them mentally and literally taking notes in your presence, over many years, it feels dangerous to read their diary,” said Winton. It made him feel self-conscious, he explained, but aware, too, that Garner has “that sliver of ice some writers talk about”.
Garner knew the possible effects of her work. “I do feel strongly that I must have often hurt people quite deeply,” she said. In the diaries, she recounts an episode with a close friend who was upset by her use of episodes from his life in her novel Cosmo Cosmolino. Garner is sad to have caused him anguish, but has no regrets. “I examine myself for guilt and don’t find any,” she writes. “I find a hard nut of something in the centre of my heart.” (She later wrote him a letter, asking for forgiveness.) If anything, she told me, there were worse things she could have included about the collapse of her relationship with Bail, but chose not to, thinking it would be gratuitous. To keep to the terms of her deal, she tried to depict her own part in “this complete absolute clusterfuck that was the end of that marriage”.
When the final part of the diaries came out in Australia in 2021, Garner was amazed by how many women emailed to thank her and to say how it reminded them of their own marriage, and how many men told her they could see themselves in Bail. She never heard from Bail himself. In her view, his response came in the form of a memoir, He., published in 2021. “He dismissed me in a very high-handed manner. I think I only took up about 14 lines,” she said. One of these lines is: “After 10 years the gradual then abrupt ending of the second marriage.” She found it funny. “I thought, OK, he put me in my place. It was a passing phase instead of a complete collapse of civilisation the way I presented it.”
Bail tells it differently. “The memoir He. was not written in response to Helen’s diaries,” he told me in an email. “It never occurred to me. I haven’t read them. They are Helen’s own view of our time together. I didn’t imagine the last volume would be published while so many of the people were still alive, including me.”
Garner knew she would not have another relationship. Once the marriage was over, her daughter suggested Garner buy the house next to hers in Melbourne. They knocked through the wall and took down the garden fence so the houses and gardens were physically connected. Garner had a new purpose, to help her daughter look after her grandchildren as they grew up. The past 20 years have been the happiest of her life.
Bail lives in a different city, so they never run the risk of meeting. With both sides having taken their swings, Garner feels a certain peace. “I sort of wish him well. I suspect he may not wish me well.” She paused. “I don’t know which one of us will die first. But we had a kind of cataclysmic relationship and it ended in sadness and pain and humiliation.” In a casual reflection that might have been lifted from her books and could serve as a distillation of all her work, she added: “That’s what people do: they smash into each other. They think they’re drawing together into an intimacy but when they get close to each other, it turns into a mighty struggle.”
There is often, at the end of a Garner book or article, a kind of rise in the prose, an opening out, an elegiac expansion. It’s usually born of something small, such as watching a home video of Joe Cinque at his brother’s wedding (Joe Cinque’s Consolation) or listening to her dying friend’s snoring as she sleeps (The Spare Room), or imagining Robert Farquharson sitting with his boys in a supermarket car park (This House of Grief). She compresses the meaning of several hundred pages into a moment.
Garner’s diaries end with a delivery. She has moved out of Bail’s flat and is painfully trying to rebuild her independence. A sofa arrives that Garner had long fantasised about buying. Once removed from its plastic cover, the sofa is revealed to be a more beautiful shade of blue than she’d remembered. “The spring morning pours into the room, bathing it in purity, a light in which the sofa levitates, as insubstantial as a cloudbank.” Like the prose, the sofa rises, liberated.
Last summer, despite her hope of staying home, Garner came on a book tour to the UK. Events had been planned: a talk at Daunt’s bookshop in London and another at the Hay festival. When we spoke a few days before her flight, she said that age had made her more anxious about logistics and travel: “It’s a hell of a long way.”
At Daunt’s, Garner sat on a chair opposite her interviewer and spoke with candid humour about her work. After about 20 minutes, she started to take longer pauses, then answered questions with: “I seem to have a block about that” and: “I’m sorry, I can’t seem to.” Finally, she just said: “Help.” The packed room became unnaturally still in anxious sympathy. The event was paused, Garner was taken downstairs, the audience waited and were eventually told that she wasn’t well and wouldn’t be returning. The rest of the tour was cancelled.
Garner has experienced this kind of sudden blanking before and been diagnosed with a condition called transient global amnesia. The last time it happened, in 2014, was during an event at an Australian university in which she’d been discussing This House of Grief. She realised she’d been talking about This House of Grief just before the London episode, too. “I think I underestimated the bad effect that doing that book had on me,” she said. After the event, Garner was taken to hospital, given the all-clear and then spent the rest of her time in Europe sick in bed with a cold. The trip, she said, was a “complete and utter shemozzle”. When she got home, she decided it was the end of a chapter: “I’m too old for international travel.”
Age presents Garner with a contradiction. Part of her is journalistically curious about the experience: “It’s like you’re backing away from life, but in fact it becomes more intensely real and fascinating as you’re losing it.” But she is also scared: not of death, but of losing her mind. She is now the age her mother was when she died after years of suffering from Alzheimer’s. “She was completely lost. She wasn’t even a human being any more,” said Garner. “I dread that degree of loss.” She has moments, small precursors. She warned me there would be pauses when she was searching for a word. It takes her longer to work out arrangements. She cries more easily and can hardly bear to watch the news.
Ten years ago, Garner wrote an essay, The Insults of Age, in which she described her excoriation of a cocktail waiter who had patronised her and her friend, asking how their shopping had been. “‘Listen,’ I said with a slow, savage calm. ‘We don’t want you to ask us these questions. We want you to be cool, and silent, like a real cocktail waiter.’” You would still talk down to Garner at your peril, but these days she is touched by acts of care from strangers, such as the man who helped her on to a stage at a recent event, reaching back his hand to take hers the way you might to a child. In court, she can no longer hear even with hearing aids; the acoustics are unreliable. “I’ve got this enormous vocabulary and I don’t know what to do with it,” she said. “That’s kind of what it’s like to be old.”
After Garner finished writing her most recent book, The Season, she spent weeks lying on her bed, turning down all invitations with the same line: “I can’t be bothered.” She has always loved lying on her bed, but this was a prolonged case. Garner realised she’d been drawing on the life force of her grandson and his team, invigorated by their youth. Her grandchildren have spent their whole lives wandering in and out of her house and her books, enlivening both. Now, she must think about the next phase: “I have to prepare myself for a certain degree of loneliness.” She has her garden and her chickens, and she also has her diary, which she continues to write most days. “That’s all I know how to do,” she said. To her mind, her entries seem less obviously interesting, more about what she had for lunch than the fraught dramas of her earlier life. But then she’ll look at a paragraph a couple of days later and think: “Actually it’s not that boring; there’s a nice turn of phrase here and there.”
Garner will go on writing her diary until she is not able to write. The diary will continue to feed her books, though who knows how many. Her editor, Jane Pearson, said another was in the works. So did Garner, in her way. When I asked if she thought The Season might be her last, Garner shot back: “Oh I hope not! I may be suffering from cognitive decline but I can still write a book.” And then she lurched sideways in her chair, laughing her head off.
