Yellow Notebook

It's hard to believe that six years have passed since the publication of Helen Garner's first volume of diaries, Yellow Notebook. It came out before Covid! In some ways that feels like another lifetime, but in some ways it seems like the blink of an eye.

It was an interesting experience to go back and reread Yellow Notebook, knowing what's coming in volumes 2 and 3. This book covers the years from 1978, just after Monkey Grip, to 1987, when she's poised on the brink of her third marriage to 'V.' When V first appears in the last sections of the diary, you feel like yelling, 'No, Helen! Don't do it!' In spite of her attraction to him, we can already see V's fatal rigidity, his self-centred intellectualism, his insistence on his own point of view, all of which are going to capsize their future relationship.

Some of my favourite parts of Yellow Notebook deal with Garner wrestling with what she calls 'the mighty force,' which is some sense of the numinous or spiritual, which she almost seems to experience as a wild beast stalking her, waiting to pounce. At this stage she seems determined not to surrender to it.

I'm so happy that these diaries have begun to draw attention from overseas readers; at long last, Garner is getting the acclaim that she's always deserved.