Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning fifty, and the storm caused by her book The First Stone.

True Stories collects Helen Garner's short non-fiction written over a period of almost fifty years. In this marvellous book are her most famous essays about family, about love and death and sex, about growing up and growing old, about birth and marriage and separation, about travel and staying home. Garner's command of the form, her honesty, humility and humour, her instinct for the right word and the shape of a sentence reveal themselves in essay after essay.

Helen Garner was born in Geelong in 1942. She worked as a high school teacher, then as a freelance journalist. Since 1977 she has published novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. She is the winner of the 2006 inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the 2016 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction, the 2019 Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature and the 2023 Australian Society of Authors Medal. Her books include This House of Grief, Monkey Grip and The Children's Bach.