A friend and I have established a tradition for the Sydney Writers Festival. We agree on a day we will attend then I select the sessions and my friend brings lunch. In 2017, I called her with my three session selections. ‘Just buy one ticket for the Helen Garner one,’ she said. ‘I’ve read nothing of hers since The First Stone.’ She was referring to a session I’d chosen with Bernadette Brennan, author of the fascinating biography, A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her Work.
I was astonished. As far as I am concerned, Helen Garner is one of Australia’s finest writers. I like her clear style of writing, her exact and punchy use of words, and the emotional and intellectual testing of ideas in her work. She also analyses everything she does and thinks with an unflinching gaze.
In this post I’ll focus on her two most recent publications: Everywhere I Look and Yellow Notebook. The first is a collection of short essays and pieces of journalism. The second is raw material, selected extracts from Garner’s diaries from 1978 to 1987. Both books give the feel of being close to the author, a friend admitted into her circle but, of course, even the diary entries present a certain persona, as Garner herself explained in 2002 (Meanjin, Vol 61, No. 1, 2002, 40-43).
Here are two of my favourite extracts from Everywhere I Look. They put into words so well the feelings and thoughts of many women, including myself, as they grow older.
I have known, of course, that beyond a certain age, women become invisible in public places. The famous erotic gaze is withdrawn. You are no longer, in the eyes of the world, a sexual being in my experience, though this forlornness is a passing phase. The sadness of the loss fades and fades. You pass through loneliness and out into a balmy freedom from the heavy labour of self-presentation. (p. 212)
The girl skipped nimbly across the stream of people and bounded towards the next mark, a woman sitting on a bench — also Asian, also alone and minding her own business. The schoolgirl stopped in front of her and did a little dance of derision, flapping both hands in mocking parody of greeting. I saw the Asian woman look up in fear and something inside me went berserk. In two strides I was behind the schoolgirl. I reached up and seized her ponytail at the roots and gave it a sharp downward yank. Her head snapped back. In a voice I didn’t recognise I snarled, ‘Give it a rest, darling.’ (p. 213).
In November last year, I attended a Sydney Writers Festival session with Helen Garner about the publication of a decade of her diaries in Yellow Notebook and purchased a treasured signed copy. The book presents an intimate portrait of the author as a young woman. The diary entries include accounts of Garner’s life as she lived through the end of one relationship and the start of another, her tender observations of her daughter, her struggles and triumphs as she became a writer, her encounters with other Australian authors, and many beautifully rendered snapshots of people, incidents and places.
Although as a diary it has no formal narrative structure, I suspect Garner edited her diary with story threads in mind. During her talk in Sydney last year, she reported her surprise and pleasure when a Melbourne colleague said he thought Yellow Notebook was the funniest of her books. For me it elicited laughter in places and pathos in others along with a voyeuristic fascination with its clues as to Garner’s life as a writer. In my view, Helen Garner deserves to be read whether or not we agree with all her views.
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Title: A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work
Author: Bernadette Brennan
Publisher: Text Publishing
Year: 2017
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1925498034
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Title: Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1 1978-1986
Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Text Publishing
Year: 2019
Pages: 272 (hardback)
ISBN13: 9781922268143
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Title: Everywhere I Look
Author: Helen Garner
Publisher: Text Publishing
Year: 2016
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1925355365
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