One Day I'll Remember This

Diaries 1987-1995

By: Helen Garner

Narrated by: Helen Garner

Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the furore that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.

With devastating honesty and sparkling humour, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another - how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both enthralling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work and the enduring value of friendship.

©2020 Helen Garner (P)2021 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd

Critic reviews

"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." (The New Yorker)

"On the page, Garner is uncommonly fierce, though this usually has the effect on me of making her seem all the more likeable. 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)

helen garner is the GOAT

I have been listening to all of her books, one after another. I am beside myself that one day I will run out. Helen’s voice in my head (and in my hands, I have read some of the books, too!) has been a pleasure I feel inadequate to describe. But I will try: She has been observing it ALL for decades with incredible insight; she reports back with the kind of common sense that comes from
an extraordinary mind. And she is funny. And she is one of the least moralizing people on earth and yet she is deeply principled and sympathetic. Some if her sentences are novels in themselves, such stunning arrangements of words, the images she brings to mind are so specific they feel familiar. I sometimes dream I could write Helen Garner to tell her how important her books are to me— this will have to do.

I could listen to Helen's brilliance for hours and hours and hours

Brilliant observations. She has such a willingness to delve into the truth of each observation. Such honesty.