Possibly it is my having lived in the same house for sixty years and spent thirty years in the same job which makes me such an avid devourer of other people’s lives. For the last twenty years or more, I have read little beside biographies, autobiographies and memoirs. Until now that is.
Helen Garner’s monumental How to End a Story has put an end to that.
Who managed to convince her that her every passing thought was worth sending out into the world? And have all those ‘names’ who put their imprimatur on that doorstop of a book really read every word, as they claim to have done? Enough already!
What an irony that when, very recently, I came across her for the first time, I felt sure the book – The Spare Room – must be a once-off, so perfect was it.
I soon learnt this was not the case and a riveting essay about her in the Guardian led me, in a fit of greed, to order a copy of the one I am now lumbered with.
Could my animus towards this harmless object come from my lingering unease at having destroyed my husband’s 200 plus notebooks-cum-diaries having decided, after endless deliberation, that his notebooks were no one’s business but his own?
It is true that if they were archived with the rest of his papers they would, one day, be pored over by some bright student, relieved to have found an acceptable topic for his or her PhD thesis.
But is this really what their author would have wanted? My guess is he would rather readers encountered not his half-formed thoughts but those thoughts distilled in his published works.
