Helen Garner
Helen Garner
Helen Garneris an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist...
NationalityAustralian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth7 November 1942
CountryAustralia
australia failure felt great invent massive novels obligation
I used to feel an obligation to invent things. I felt I was a failure because I didn't do massive great novels about Australia or the outback or something. I just don't feel that any more.
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.
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.
admit bad call change people reason redeeming spare ugly
While I was writing 'The Spare Room,' I thought, 'I'm going to look really bad in this book - there's no redeeming this kind of awful, ugly emotion', and I thought, 'I'm not going to change it. I'll call the character 'Helen' and admit to those feelings.' I think this is a reason why people write.
chunk experience machine remembered stolen taking time
It's much more interesting for me to think that taking a chunk of experience and mushing it up together with other things that are inventible, remembered from some other time or stolen from other people's stories... and see if I can make it into something that works, an object, a little machine that runs.
believe inventing totally urge
I don't believe that anything's totally invented... If you're completely inventing a story, there wouldn't be an urge to tell it.
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.