Helen Garner
Helen Garner
Helen Garneris an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 November 1942
CountryAustralia
experience learned speak stone
I think one thing I've learned not to do from my experience with The First Stone was to pester somebody, to keep insisting that they speak to you.
came challenge detachment ideas labour obsession people
Ideas came swarming through her, and like many people who labour in the obsession of solitude, she lacked the detachment to challenge them.
exciting exercising otherwise wonderful
There's only one thing I know what to do, so I'm pretty much otherwise unemployable. The idea that you can make a living from exercising your only skill is wonderful. And it's wonderful to be read. It's a really exciting and happy thing to be read.
Janet Malcolm's probably the writer I most admire and who's most influenced me.
bank drag fairly life painful stream work
Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.
against anger dying form mixed people raging realise
It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it's a kind of raging against what's happening.
dread maybe producing
Maybe this is pathetic, but I still dread producing a book that doesn't earn back its advance. I hate obligations that are financially foggy.
future gives life wasted
I tell you one thing that makes me feel I haven't wasted my life, and that is I've got some grandchildren. You can't overestimate the kind of opening to the future that gives a person, I think.
perhaps
I don't understand my own sporadic collapses into passivity. Perhaps I never will.
baths courts places supposed
Courts are supposed to be places of reason. But this, of course, is a fantasy. I mean, there is reason being used as a technique. But courts, in fact, are baths of emotions.
core deeply far touched troubled
I think that there must be a point of self-immersion in a story that is a point of no return. You get far enough in that the story has really touched you to the core and deeply troubled you and made you unhappy and fearful, and then how do you get out of that? I'm a writer, so my way of getting out of that is to write.
bar best happened living
That's the best thing that's ever happened to me, bar none, is having grandchildren and living by them and being part of their lives.
complex heading involving label love matters rage sorts
As in all matters involving love, which has so many different meanings, you find that the feeling that we label 'love' is not a simple feeling, it's a very complex one. Under the heading 'love' can come all sorts of rage and desperation.
composed largely lying rather
I just... my childhood seems, when I look back, to be largely composed of reading, lying on the bed. I mean, my mother was always shouting, 'Go outside!' But she shouted it at all of us. I think I was just kind of... rather an introverted child, probably.