“Are you going to read all that?” the young waitress asked as she laid down my cappuccino in a mug in front of me with a flourish. And not a drop spilled. “That’s so impressive!”
I caught her accolade deftly, but I was hurtling along on the crest of the wave of How to End a Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998 by Helen Garner. My Garner brick, I have been calling it. All 770 pages of it.
It was worth lugging it down to the cafe because I needed to hasten the end of her third marriage. It’s not suspense that carries me along. I know she has been free and happy for more than a quarter of a century. The way she has edited her diary entries takes me with her. I can see from her intimate account how easy it is to be entangled in a toxic relationship. To have been the frog who entered the sweet, tepid waters, about to be scalded alive.
I’m with her as she hangs on with the stubbornness of a partner who just wants their lying, cheating husband to tell the truth. With the pigheadedness of someone who doesn’t want to fail at marriage a third time. I just have to get to the end when she has finally, finally left him.
I pump my fist over and over in triumph at her delicious blue couch delivered to her, after she’s left, after she’s established herself in her independent accommodation.
Once the Garner brick is finished, more than two thirds polluted with mentions of the third husband, I’m onto reading reviews and articles. In this February 2026 Guardian interview, she comments on the third husband’s elliptical memoir, He, where she is despatched in just twelve lines. She found it funny. “I thought, OK, he put me in my place.”
While still in Denmark for my writing break last week, someone or something I can no longer recall directed my attention to Rebecca Solnit’s latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End.Notes on a World of Change. The reviewer promised that it was a book of positivity in a relentless barrage of negativity that is this world we currently live in. I couldn’t resist this.
For some peculiar reason, I haven’t read any of Solnit’s other books. She is best known for generating the term “mansplaining” after the experience of having a man tell her about her 2003 biography and cultural history of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge.
Some time ago I began to seek perspective on world events by dipping back into history, listening to podcasts on the French Revolution, or the Napoleonic Wars and on and on. What we have survived is reassuring to me. This too, will pass.
Rebecca Solnit’s book brings me back into now, but from an eagle eyed view. The book’s ultimate message is that “these brutal politics are a backlash against the vision of interconnection.” (Chapter 6, The Disconnectors.)
The long list of accomplishments and progression relating to civil rights campaigned for and achieved, the appreciation of first nation’s land management practises are dwelled on. What we have achieved in terms of looking after our environment. Her hypnotic, kind voice points out that there are positive signs in our world, along with the brutal chaos. Everything is happening at once, so there is both regression and progression.
Am I doing this book justice? The immersive experience of listening to it was such a soul balm that I am struggling to articulate its impact clearly. There was even the joyous moment for me where she refers to one of my favourite novels Howard’s End and its epigraph, ‘Only Connect.’ I am so taken with this I’ve had tattooed on my right shoulder a couple of years ago.
So if you feel the need for an Easter reset, listening to the audiobook version of The Beginning Comes After the End may just be the thing.
I could be forgiven for thinking that Mercury retrograde had its claws in me. Only it finished a couple of days before I found myself on Monday in my very reliable car at my local shopping centre, everything packed for a self-guided writing retreat getaway. Well, almost everything. I was missing my very favourite fountain pen, which I could not locate. I had let that go. There was just one more errand until I could pick up my writing buddy and we could be on our way. It was a nearly five-hour drive, so I was keen to catch the early morning hours when I’m freshest.
With all my tasks ticked off, I slid into the car. It would not, would not move from Park to Drive. I tried all the things. Leaving it for a while. Turning it on and off. Walking home to pick up the other fob, just in case that worked.
Nothing.
I had to call for roadside assistance.
Normally, this would be a simple thing. But like many support services, you need to answer verbal prompts before actually joining the queue to speak to a humanoid.
But on this day, my voice, which had begun to fade into barks and croaks the day before, had completely disappeared. The cold that had started during the week before, that I had tried to de-create with positive thinking was not so easily dissuaded.
I tried to bark my address into the phone, but the bot was having trouble hearing my laryngitic voice. Was I doomed to be stuck on hold forever, just like the Scottish men stuck in the voice activated lift trying to get to level eleven? (Watch this if you have 3 mins. Too funny.)
Mustering up as much sound as I could, I stage whispered my details again into the phone. Finally I was put through to someone who could accommodate my hoarse whispering to get the information she needed. A maximum of two-hour wait was announced.
Watching the fresh morning slip away, I texted my travel companion to alert her to the delay.
I had just enough time to wonder morbidly if I should go on this long-anticipated retreat after all. Fretted about spreading my germs.
The roadside help mechanic couldn’t get my car out of Park either, and couldn’t determine what was causing the fault. He eventually over-rode it so I could at least drive the car home and get my regular mechanic to review it later that day.
By now it was lunchtime, and in desperation I messaged my husband to see if I could drive his car instead. He texted me back immediately with a yes. As I waited for him, I emptied the car of my luggage as best as I could with the roulette wheel of which door would decide to open when I clicked the fob. The boot was particularly cantankerous but eventually yielded. In between lugging my suitcases and endless bags to the porch, I pummelled the car and shouted at it. I was alone with no witnesses to my tantrum. Alas this also had no impact on the car.
Darling husband arrived home at the same time as my road-trip companion, and finally we were on the way.
The drive was eerily quiet. Our long-awaited opportunity to catch up and debrief was squandered in the silent journey, with me trying to whisper a pleasantry every now and again.
The sudden smiting of my power of speech reminded me of when I moved to Greece in 1996, knowing only the words for hello and goodbye. Not much of a boast, as they’re the same word. Conversation is a vital exchange, and its absence stripped me of power and independence.
As the youngest of six children, verbal repartee was how we manifested our sibling rivalry. Landing the wickedest pun at the highest volume in order to be heard over the din was everything. As a young adult, I clearly took these skills a little too far, and was known by my friends as Razor Tongue.
But despite the social vacuum in the car ride, we made it safely to our writing getaway, albeit many hours after we had hoped to arrive. My voice gradually returned after 48 hours, not the one to two weeks the interwebs had prognosticated.
Emboldened by this, I decided I would purchase a replacement for my very favourite fountain pen. Stick it to the cruel universe. I would feel the flow of my pen over paper during the writing retreat. The small town we were staying in had several shops, including stationery, but no fountain pens. A half-hour drive to a bigger town saw me scanning the aisles of a chain stationery store and snatching up a substitute pen in a snazzy blue colour.
Back at our Airbnb, I opened up the pen to assemble it and plunge into its tactile joyousness.
But. It was a ballpoint pen. A superior one. But not a fountain pen like my favourite.
Darling husband found my fountain pen, which will be there when I return later today. But why? Why?
Sometimes, the universe will have its bloody annoying way.
When The Observer article first dropped in July 2025, questioning the truth of the memoir The Salt Path, I was riveted. The article is entitled ‘The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were spun from lies, deceit and desperation.’
Let me summarise for you. The Salt Path author’s nom-de-plume is Raynor Winn. Her actual name is Sally Walker. Her memoir posits that she and her husband lost their home through no fault of their own, and then he was diagnosed with the hideous cortico-basal-degeneration disease – CBD. In the face of these two monumental setbacks, they took up their rucksacks and hiking boots and headed to the Salt Path – the South Downs Way – in the UK. He is miraculously cured by all that walking and they re-establish themselves financially and all is joy.
Two other spin-off books with the same narrative arc of man-is-sick-man-and-wife-walk-man-gets-better have since been published, and all have done well. Walker has been a cash cow for the publisher Penguin.
Enter The Observer article which revealed that Sally Walker had embezzled more than 64,000 pounds from her employer when she was bookkeeping at his real estate company in a sleepy little UK village. When her dodgy accounting was revealed, Sally Walker begged them not to press charges and repaid the money by drumming up a loan with heinously large interest payments, using her home as collateral. Over time the loan was called in, and that’s how she lost the house.
Doubts have also been cast on her husband’s CBD diagnosis which usually has a six-eight year prognosis. He is still alive and quite hearty more than thirteen years after his diagnosis.
Anyone, like myself, who attempts memoir understands that the whole truth can never be told. Only my version of events, through my idiosyncratic lenses and biases. But. As the quote from one of my favourite authors that begins this blog says, we as writers have to put down the bad and stupid things we do.
Like Wil Patterson did in his memoir Mr Ordinary Goes to Jail where he traces his gradually escalating financial pressure to provide the lifestyle his spouse wanted. And then there is the day when he sees a cheque cross his desk (he works in insurance) which is made out to his name. He banks it, panics and then – nothing. Nobody notices, and so bit by bit he steals cheques that are not made out to him. On and on it goes, but eventually he is caught and fully co-operates with the police. He also shares the experience of his three-year sentence and what he learned about the prison system. It’s a deeply human book. Maybe Sally Walker could have written that book, but instead she chose to write a novel in which she cast herself as innocent victim. And markets it as a memoir.
The journalist who broke the Salt Path story, Chloe Hadjimatheou, has recently done a seven-part podcast on the controversy, bringing yet more deceit to light. I binge-listened to it. Public service announcement – you have to sign up to the Observer podcast as a free trial to hear the last episode so you may as well sign up in the beginning and save yourself all those ads.
In case you don’t have the time required to listen to it all, I can share some nuggets:
The affecting scene in the book and movie where the bailiffs knock on the door? Didn’t happen. They’d already long left.
As well as embezzling from her employer, Sally Walker stole from her parents-in- law. And her mother. She has never faced criminal charges on any of her thefts.
I could go on and on. Penguin still lists The Salt Path as an unflinchingly honest memoir. It’s nothing of the sort. It’s a literary heist on the public’s sympathy and kind hearts.
Here’s forever and always to the Garners of this world, the memoirists who tackle writing all the worst things about ourselves, honouring the integrity contract between author and reader.
As the youngest in my family, I am the only Gen-Xer in a sea of Boomers. I take some pride in that. After all, having suffered for all those years being the smallest, weakest and slowest, I am now basking in the smugness of being the youngest and trendiest of my siblings.
So imagine my horror to find myself the butt of Kitty Flanagan’s jokes about how to spot a Gen-Xer. It’s obvious because we use book-like phone covers, with actual credit cards stored in the fly leaf of the book-like cover, if you will. (See pink phone case above, now off to its new home on the Buy and Sell group.)
Some time ago I did put my digital credit cards in my iPhone wallet, but I found my fingers tripping and fumbling at the cash register when trying to tap and go. So I’d regressed back to using the actual credit card. Because they were sitting there, right in that age-defining, Gen-X pink phone case.
After watching Kitty’s skit, I looked around me, and sure enough, I could see a demarcation line between women my age who were keeping up with the techy trends, with just a phone cover on the back of the phone, and those book-phone nerds like myself who were falling behind.
This failure ate away at me. Onto my lengthy to-do list it went “purchase a new phone case asap.”
I started practicing my tap and go, and planned to get a new, clear phone cover. My magnificent yellow phone had been cloaked in a pink phone cover which both aged me and occluded the buttercup tones of my device. But I wasn’t completely stupid and vowed to get a screen cover so my exposed phone screen would survive the transition from the pink book.
“Would you like another screen cover on top of the one you’ve already got?” the man at one of those phone shops in the middle of the shopping centre aisle asked.
Doh. “Um, no thanks.”
“Would like plain or sparkly?”
“Sparkly. Definitely sparkly.”
So I’m back in the tech game for the next six seconds at least, no more the butt of Kitty Flanagan’s jokes.
Like many youngest children of large families, I read books when perhaps I was too young to fully comprehend them.
Wuthering Heights was one such book. I can’t count the number of times I read it as a teen, stumbling through the Yorkshire dialect and trying to visualise the dark, powerful moors and dysfunctional households. Bit by bit I made more sense of it the book.
I studied Literature in High School and still recall the long, ranty essay I wrote to refute the notion that Wuthering Heights as a book dies when Catherine does. With passion I asserted that the second half of the book was every bit as good as the first. “Your essay is as wild as the moors you are writing about” was one comment from the teacher, but any criticism of Wuthering Heights at the time generated a vociferous, if incoherent defence.
I continued to re-read the book as I matured, and eventually formed the view that there’s something wild and unformed about Emily Brontë’s only published work that has adolescent appeal. That it is better to read it while still on the cusp of adulthood as I did, to appreciate it. Otherwise it may come off as shrill and histrionic.
All this to say, I enjoyed the 2026 “Wuthering Heights” movie adaptation as a creative riff on a classic work. For me it was satisfying to end the movie when Catherine died, and to utilise the lush possibilities of sets and costumes to consummate the desperately unhealthy connection between Catherine and Heathcliff. The movie passes beyond the worldly experience Emily Brontë had and weaves its way to modern times with the Yorkshire moors still as the star of the show. As they should be.
I’m in Hobart for a week – a few days’ work trip with several more of pleasure tacked on. To be in my 60th year and never having been to Tasmania before seems shameful, but I have a long list of places not yet visited.
So now that I’m in Hobart, by default I must go to Mona, the Museum of Old and New Art. This phenomenon is the creation of David Walsh. From his spoils as a professional gambler he has created this glorious money pit of a gallery dedicated to art, drinking and music, in his home town of Hobart.
Going to Mona means you need a day to visit. Then a day to digest. What’s stayed with me today is this installation by Arcangelo Sassolino entitled ‘the paradoxical nature of life’. Metal legs, a glass top makes up the table. And a large rock has been carefully levered into place. The glass bows under the weight of the boulder.
What I took from this artwork is that the boulder is our awareness of our own mortality. The the glass table is death, which will have its way in the end. Everything passes.
This magnificent tension between awareness of our own mortality and courage to function day to day is what makes life magical, I believe. To paraphrase E.M. Forster from Howard’s End, we are better humans, day to day, if we remember that in the end, we all die.
But right now, the glass is holding. Right now, we’re alive.
At some point in my school life, possibly in primary school, I developed a writer’s bump on my right hand. As someone who can be spatially challenged, I have by now an almost unconscious habit of touching my right hand to orient myself in space.
Perhaps my writer’s bump was caused by a burst of conscientiousness when I studied with extra force. Or maybe it was just normal at that analogue time of teaching and testing when pen and paper was where it was at.
I had tried to learn typing in my first year of high school, but the nuns assured me ‘there are girls that do French and girls that type, and you are a girl that does French.’ However even my Dominican Nun high school had become sufficiently renaissance by 1980 to concede that perhaps there were girls that could do both. (The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, anyone?) Being able to touch type was the single most useful skill I learned at high school.
But in those analogue days, I do know that by the time I’d finished high school and completed every last sodding exam, my handwriting was unravelling to the point of illegibility. In Year Thirteen when worked in a bank to fill in time before I could start at university, I had to learn how to print neatly again. None of the data processors who viewed my handwritten account application forms could understand what on earth I’d written.
Instead of going into medicine where poor handwriting is a career-long phenomenon, I went into the arts and community services. But by then, everything was being digitised.
And yet. Handwriting has been my go-to since I started journalling at age 23, committing the horror that is our twenties to the page. Even in those days when I would often note how much I wanted a Word Processor (remember those?), there was a recognition of the magic of handwriting. The moment of sitting down, pen to page to this day generates a deep sense of peace. Perhaps it is the different parts of my brain coming together to create words on the page, rather than just tapping them out on a keyboard. (See NPR article for a synthesis of a research article on the topic.)
And if ever I’m creatively stuck, analogue writing always shifts me into a slipstream of delicious forward momentum. And while life is much simpler at 60 than it was at 23, my journal will always and ever be my constant companion.
I had let it go. The Sunday Blog. Because this weekend has been consumed with a creative writing assignment I thought was due a week later than it was. Because there’s the day job and travel and community volunteering and all the things.
But here I am, the afternoon is now fresh and bluff, and can still wind some of my thoughts into a spool of thread before the weekend is out.
Last week I mentioned my octopus issue – namely having so many things on it is hard to keep all eight legs in the boat. And this week I knew it was time to re-invoke the old acceptance of what is. One of the many remember, then forget, then remember wisdoms. I’m still painted into the corner of overdoing it, but accepting this immediately makes me feel better.
Also, I did my Vision Board prior to the Chinese New Year. So everything is going to be just fine. And if not, I’ll let it be as it is. Or something.
It’s definitely too early to be making such heady claims, but I think my smart watch has created the personality revolution that I hoped I was paying for. Sure, I may have jabbed inexpertly at the preferences and set my goals a little low. It tells me every day that I’ve closed my activity rings, often by 8.30am.
But there’s a special magic to me of having a dashboard of my lifestyle. What I eat and how much I move is now on a dial. I take a photo of whatever I’m eating, and before you can say algorithm, it’s analysed it with frightening accuracy down to the last micronutrient. My display shows calories in and out, like seeing how much petrol or windscreen wiper fluid I have left.
My rings. All closed again.
Sadly, this dashboard is only reflecting my physical behaviours. There are large swathes of self-sabotaging behaviours which are harder to measure, perhaps. Like trying to pack an octopus into a boat, no sooner do you get eighth recalcitrant leg into the boat when the first and second flop back out in rebellion.
Right now, my “over-doing” it legs are flailing around and paying as much heed as a dog at the beach pays to their owner. Lulled by the quietness of January, I’ve gone back to my compulsive “yeses” with the usual result of a diary that hypnotises me with its complexity. But I comfort myself with the impending Chinese New Year. I’ve got another chance to get all eight legs into the boat, if you will.
