How does it feel to be Helen Garner, one of Australia’s most respected authors, having published not one but two volumes of her very personal diaries? “It feels like my guts are hanging out on the clothesline,” the author said.

In a thoughtful and frank discussion with Michael Williams as part of Guardian Australia’s monthly book club, hosted over Zoom in partnership with Australia At Home and Sydney writers’ festival, Garner delved into topics of regret, reader backlash and the anxieties she felt in poring over her scribbled-down past to make it ready for public consumption.

“I would wake up at 2am and I would think, how can I possibly say that? How can I put that in?” Garner said. “Then I’d get up in the morning and sit at the desk and look at the passage and I’d realise as usual … that it seems, in daylight, quite different. It’s as if there’s a part of you that doesn’t function at 2 o’clock in the morning. … I experienced that over and over and over.”

She described the experience as being “a bit like being a ghost in your former life, just hanging over this record of the past”.

Garner said it was nerve-wracking to contact many of the people represented in the work, One Day I’ll Remember This (out now through Text), to explain that she was publishing passages about them, albeit de-identified. “I was quite surprised by how many of the people I contacted [said] ‘Go ahead, I trust you’ – which was an astonishing thing to say under the circumstances.”

The response from readers to Garner’s first volume of diaries, Yellow Notebook, published this time last year, also galvanised and surprised her. It was “thrilling” to find out she “was fully a member of the human race”, she said, because writers sometimes get a sense “that there’s something awful about you and that you’ve got this terrible eye that looks at people and won’t not see”.

Throwing forward to volume three – which she hopes to start work on in 2021 – Garner mentioned they would likely look at her discovery of the courts as a subject matter for her writing, a discovery that led to her books Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House Of Grief (2014).

“A court and a hospital and a morgue: they’re places of extreme seriousness where human existence is being dealt with within a very firm, agreed-upon structure,” Garner said. “It’s an enormous privilege to be able to go to those places and be free to observe and use what’s happening there.”

She also harked back to her experience of the public outcry to her breakout non-fiction book, The First Stone, which interrogated allegations of a sexual assault on campus.

“Feminism came like a bombshell into my life in the early 70s and enabled all sorts of things for me. It’s been a liberating force in my life and I’ll always be grateful for that,” Garner said.

But she said feminism, like all movements, “calcified”, although some of the backlash she experienced from feminists after the publication of The First Stone blindsided her. “I didn’t quite expect the mean-spirited, spitefulness of a lot of it, I was shocked by that,” she said.

The experience of that response, and of others’ rejection of her from the feminist movement, was also freeing, as it meant she was no longer beholden to anyone. “Now I can say whatever I want to – and that was quite exciting and wonderful actually,” she said.

Garner spoke movingly of her different relationships with her father – with whom she fought regularly – and mother, and of believing that she would be able to better get to know her mother when her father died. Then her mother died first.

“I’d give anything if she could walk in here now and I could be sweet to her,” she said.

Garner said she regretted the lack of kindness she showed her mother – especially since after her mother had died, she developed a very positive relationship with her father. “I get appalled at examples of my selfishness, what I see as my selfishness here, from back then.”

There was hope, however: “It’s not too late, if you discover regret in a useful way before you’re on your deathbed.”