Helen Garner
Helen Garner (born 1942) is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist. Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene – it is now widely considered a classic. She has a reputation for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels, Monkey Grip and The Spare Room (2008).
Throughout her career, Garner has written both fiction and non-fiction. She attracted controversy with her book The First Stone (1995) about a sexual-harassment scandal in a university college. She has also written for film and theatre, and has consistently won awards for her work, including the Walkley Award for a 1993 Time Magazine report. Adaptations of two of her works have appeared as feature films: her debut novel Monkey Grip and her true-crime book Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) – the former released in 1982 and the latter in 2016.
Peter Rose reviews 'Yellow Notebook: Diaries, Volume I, 1978–1987' by Helen Garner
Anyone who keeps a diary day in, day out for decades knows why Helen Garner, a few years ago, destroyed her early ones, deeming them boring and self-obsessed. Incineration has a long, proud history: think of Henry James, late in life, at his incinerator in Rye, burning all his letters and private papers – that lamentable blaze. The sheer misery and tedium of our early journals can be dejecting. ‘What is the point of this diary?’ Garner asks herself in 1981. ‘There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.’
... (read more)
Joan Didion. Not sure what happened, to her or to me, but she lost me about twenty years ago.
... (read more)Jan McGuinness reviews 'A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work' by Bernadette Brennan
Who is the I in Helen Garner’s work? This is the question Bernadette Brennan probes by canvassing more than forty years of Garner’s writing and her seventy-four-year existence ...
... (read more)
You could regard this latest book by Helen Garner as simply a collection of various essays, a miscellany if you wish, but to do so would be to give it less than its due. There is nothing casual or accidental about Everywhere I Look. Its coherence may, of course, have much to do with Garner's voice, which is consistent and compelling, as is her actual writin ...
Helen Garner
Tuesday, 24 March 2015Helen Garner (1942–) is an Australian novelist and non-fiction writer. Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, was published in 1977 and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has written many works of fiction, including The Children’s Bach (1984), Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), and The Spare Room (2008), as well as non-fiction, including ...
Bernadette Brennan on 'The Children's Bach' by Helen Garner for Reading Australia
‘For our house is our corner of our world … If we look at it intimately, the humblest dwelling has beauty.’
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (1958)
Houses, and their domestic spaces of intimacy and negotiation, s ...
Already, Anu Singh’s story is grimly familiar. Now free again, just thirty-one, she has entered the popular pantheon of malefactors. Her attractive face appears in the newspapers, taut with self-justification. There is talk of a documentary. Notoriety, even a kind of celebrity – that amoral nirvana – is hers.
If Singh’s deepest motivation f ...
Felicity Plunkett reviews 'This House of Grief' by Helen Garner
In August 2013, Robert Farquharson was denied special leave to appeal to the High Court against his conviction for the murder of his three young sons Jai, Tyler, and Bailey, aged ten, seven, and two. This was the final legal chapter in the lengthy story Helen Garner explores in This House of Grief.
Garner begins with the ‘Once’ that prefaces fairy tales – stories we think we know well enough to recite from memory; clear, oracular, and resonant: ‘Once there was a hard-working bloke who lived in a small Victorian country town with his wife and their three young sons.’ One day, ‘out of the blue, his wife told him that she was no longer in love with him’. Transformed by this into ‘the sad husband’, Farquharson packs a suitcase and leaves, saddled with the ‘shit car’ of the two owned by the couple.
... (read more)
Susan Lever reviews ‘Literary Activists: Writer-Intellectuals and Australian Public Life’ By Brigid Rooney
While rehearsing in Martin Place for the recent Sydney Festival, my daughter found herself dancing on a plinth while a heckler below chanted ‘Wanker!’ throughout. On another platform, her fellow artists, all of them performing their intricately choreographed work, endured the calls of another passer-by, ‘You’re so predictable!’ In Australia, everybody’s a critic.
... (read more)