Australian author Helen Garner reflects on decades of unsparing writing and facing fierce backlash during a career marked by cultural flashpoints as her new book prepares for release.
Standing in the small category of authors who are recognized in public, 83-year-old Helen Garner fields strong opinions from strangers on the street whenever she is stopped via video call from her home in Melbourne. Rather than retreating from the hostility, the writer has cultivated an obstinate independence that keeps her moving in unauthorized directions.
Bohemian Life in Melbourne Inspired Monkey Grip
Garner’s literary journey began after she fled a rigid, repressed childhood in the town of Geelong near Melbourne. As the oldest of six children, she frequently clashed with her father, a wool merchant and a rather domineering person
who bullied her meek, stay-at-home mother and kept no books in the house, according to the source. After attending an Anglican girls’ school, she won a place at the University of Melbourne and spent the best part of three years in the pub.
That bohemian period inspired her first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977. The book chronicled Nora, a woman with a young child living in a shared house in Melbourne and on-off dating a heroin addict named Javo. Reflecting on the project, Garner noted that she had modest ambitions and merely wanted to jot down her thoughts in a notebook, treating it as a private act rather than aiming for anything mighty.
Backlash Over The First Stone and Surviving Literary Hostility
Decades later, her 1990s nonfiction book The First Stone ignited a massive cultural debate. Interrogating an accusation where two female students at the University of Melbourne accused their college master of groping them, Garner presented the story as a possible overreaction, putting the boot into what she viewed as a punitive form of feminism.
I had the shit kicked out of me! People savaged me. And it took me a while, but when I got over it, I thought: ‘Well, I survived that, and now I’m free. I can write what I really want. And I won’t have to see if it comes out pure.’ Being hated is very bracing. It’s not destructive.
Helen Garner, via Theguardian
The intense hostility she faced included threats from literary judges who vowed to block the book if it made award longlists. Garner simply laughed off the threats, noting that surviving the storm left her permanently liberated from seeking artistic purity.
Shifting to Literary True Crime and The Season
Her marriage to fellow novelist Murray Bail played a part in her permanent shift toward nonfiction. Bail maintained a rigid hierarchy of literary forms that did not suit her work, and splitting up gave her just the impetus she needed to relax into being a nonfiction writer without defensiveness.
That nonfiction path led to devastating true crime books, including This House of Grief, which tracked the trial and conviction of Robert Farquharson over eight years while appeals played out. More recently, inspiration struck closer to home through her teenage grandson, Ambrose, who played Australian rules football for the Flemington Colts Under-16s team.
While people expected a polemic on sports violence, Garner envisioned a nanna’s book focused on following a single season without tedious historical explainers. Public appearances for the project brought out rows of white-haired women holding hankies, filling a gap in literature where she feels grandmothers are rarely portrayed authentically.