Helen Garner has death on her mind. In recent decades, it has permeated her work in fascinating and unexpected ways. There is her novel The Spare Room (2008), which is about a woman’s struggles to care for a dying friend held hostage to dangerous delusions; This House of Grief (2014), a true-crime book about a devasting act of filicide; and, in her most recent volume of diaries, How to End a Story (2021), an account of the death of her marriage to the novelist Murray Bail.