There is something old fashioned about Helen Garner’s essays. We are therefore surprised to see a reference to Amy Winehouse makeup, Obama, or the brutality of Russell Crowe films. It could be her work seems old fashioned because it is so exquisitely shaped: who would have picked out that particular incident or phrase out of all the incidents and phrases one experiences in a lifetime and held it up, gemlike, for us to admire? This restraint, clarity, exactitude is so rare in a world where everyone writes for a world audience every day.
Helen Garner may be a household name in her native Australia. I’d never heard of her until I came across a reference to her on Goodreads recently. She is an Australian novelist, essayist, journalist…let’s call her master wordsmith. Her essays jump into your life with two feet and settle in forever, never to be forgotten. Her voice is woman writ large. I adore her sense of entitlement to her own opinions, now she is in her seventies. If only Australia didn't keep its best to itself.
This collection of essays was published last year by Text Publishing of Melbourne, Australia. I wonder how that works nowadays, that a book published in Australia is sold in the United States. In any case, I am very grateful it is possible to have read these brave, crazy, funny, deeply interesting and beautifully written pieces on growing up in fifties and sixties Australia, writing for a living, marrying badly, being a grandmother to a boy who can calm down and relax when he can slip into his cowboy outfit after the stress of a vacation away.
These essays were all written in the last twenty years or so, but some look back: “In the late 1970’s I lived in Paris for awhile…” and “When I was in my forties I went on holiday to Vanuatu…” It is certain that we get the best of all possible worlds because these stories are the ones that float to the surface after a lifetime of writing, and because of that lifetime of writing the words are crafted with economy for clarity and meaning. Each idea is distilled so dramatically that we are mainlining experience—a short sharp shock of memory and what it meant in the context of a life.
Her curiosity inflames us. Garner has harbored a fascination with crime, not with psychopaths, but with ordinary folk under extraordinary pressure. Her essays and stories can be dark, but she is so intimate with her thinking, we get distracted into self-examination. She captures something that we, had we been careful, thoughtful, and honest, might recognize as the lesser side of being human: a kind of despair, confusion, uncertainty, and a search for quiet, clarity, stability, and love. She looks at our crisis moments and wonders, what caused this?
Garner looks for telling moments in her own life, and listens to what those moments tell her about herself, which she then conveys to us, making us laugh, sign, commiserate. She is tough on herself, and sometimes on others: one of her early essays tells of her long friendship with the Australian author Tim Winton. The younger man got more attention with his writing than she did, so she could sometimes rough him up a little for payback.
And Garner herself admits to being “scorched” by the journalist Janet Malcolm who apparently reviewed The First Stone: Some Questions of Sex and Power in The New Yorker (I can’t find that review, alas!). Malcolm was always Garner’s role model, the one “who has influenced and taught me more than any other.” Garner tells us of Malcolm’s phrase, “the rapture of firsthand encounters with another’s lived experience,” which describes perfectly what I feel when I read Garner’s essays.
New Yorker staff writer James Wood reviewed this collection of essays last year. If I had seen it then, I would have known of Garner a year earlier. Somehow that seems important. This collection I would love to have on my shelf to dip into again and again to see how she did that sense of immediacy and intimacy and personality.
You can buy this book here:
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