Monday Morning Wake-Up Call (Truth!)

Posted on by Live & Learn

V: (with a cross laugh) ‘You bloody women! You always think you know what a bloke’s thinking!’

H: No we don’t! We have to make it up! You won’t engage with us! You won’t answer when we speak! You present us with a blank face! We have to invent a response, out of loneliness and despair! So we won’t have to live in an emotional vacuum!’

— Helen Garner, How to End a Story: Diaries 1995-1998 (The Text Publishing Company, 2021)

Notes:

  • This is Helen Garner’s third volume of her diaries. Like her second, it is highly recommended.
  • Book review by Peter Craven in the 10/29/21 edition of the Sydney Morning Herald: “Helen Garner’s diaries: a portrait of a writer at her wit’s end.” “This is the most powerful and the most continuous of the volumes of Helen Garner’s diaries so far, and it reads like a representation of someone with nothing but the bereft grief of her interiority to sustain her in the face of a derangement….The Garner who, someone says, never seems to have had enough love so that the small slights and resentments become like a tidal wave in their disproportion, the Garner who is forever ignoring her own needs in the hope of being loved.”

23 thoughts on “Monday Morning Wake-Up Call (Truth!)”

  2. She has a point, for sure…although sometimes I zone out when Andy speaking to. Jerry Seinfeld had a bit where he asked the women in the audience if they would like to know what their partners were thinking; The response was enthusiastic. He said, ‘so you want to know what men are thinking? Well here it is – nothing’. Andy is definitely in the group who zones out and circles back – sort of a mental boomerang.

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