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My early diaries filled me with so much shame I burned them. I’m publishing the rest | Helen Garner

Revisiting a diary forces you to confront ‘ugly, foolish behaviour’, writes Helen Garner. Pulling together a book of extracts was instructive – but not easy

• Read more about Guardian Australia’s Unmissable books of 2019

I’ve always thought I was quite good at reading faces, but the look people give you when you tell them you’re going to publish your diary is more complex and mysterious than the average expression: a half-smiling blur of alarm, tinged with suspicion and protest, which opens into a shyly guilty curiosity.

A writer I like and greatly respect, when I told her about my plan, drew in a sharp breath and said, “Your idea of privacy must be very different from mine.” I was mortified. Did she imagine my diary as a narcissistic spilling of guts, the sort of ghastly self-glorifying mush that women like Anaïs Nin used to spew out? We were sitting in a bar. I started babbling about how it was a stream of fragments, chunks of life. She still had that doubtful look. So I got out my phone and showed her photos of a couple of pages. Her face brightened. “Now I get it,” she said. “These are experiences that anybody might have lived.” Phew! I wiped the sweat from my brow.

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