The real value of this collection is the opportunity it affords us to see the domestic, ordinary, everyday world through Garner’s eyes ... Keen observances.
It gets off to a tentative and makeshift start ... By a quarter of the way in, I was utterly in her hands ... Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest and economical.
These journals run to more than 800 pages, every single one of which contains a passage of such distilled acuity and brilliance, it leaves you half drunk with exhilaration ... These are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf’s.
Great writing ... As with the best Garner, however, the main achievement of the entry isn’t what it says: it’s how much it doesn’t say ... One of the recurring pleasures of How to End a Story is watching Garner make the case for this kind of off-the-grid noticing, and the writing that grows out of it, over and over again.
Offering intoxicating insight into the creative mind, Garner’s diaries will tantalize the voyeur and inspire fellow visionaries who embrace such journeys of discovery.
