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.