January 13, 2022 47the same one who in This House of
Grief (2014)—an award- winning ac-
count of the trial, retrial, and ultimate
conviction of a man accused of killing
his children—dismisses an attempt
by the defense to suggest that the de-
fendant could not have committed the
heinous act because he loved his kids:
“There it was again, the sentimental
fantasy of love as a condition of sim-
ple benevolence, a tranquil, sunlit re-
gion in which we are safe from our
own destructive urges.” The people in
Garner’s books are defined by their
interactions with others; life is com-
munal, even for those who wish it were
not so. Her most desolate portraits are
of those who get left on their own. (In
This House of Grief, she repeatedly ex-
presses pity for the father, despite her
growing conviction that he did kill his
children, because he seems increas-
ingly lonely and lost in the courtroom.)
In her fiction—a handful of novels
and novellas, and few dozen short sto-
ries, all of them contemporary, most set
in or around Melbourne, where she has
spent most of her life—Garner writes
about middle- and lower- middle-
class women and men for whom the
definitions of love and relationship
and family are never stable, the rules
never set. Mothers, like the one in her
1980 novella Honour, find themselves
displaced owing to divorce and the
novelty of new living arrangements.
Women who never wanted children,
like the main character of her 1992
novel Cosmo Cosmolino, end up as
den mothers to the damaged drifters
who board in their homes. Friends and
family members can fall away almost
overnight; strangers can swoop in out
of nowhere and cause chaos.
There is ample darkness in Garner’s
books, even beyond the works of true
crime. People die, both literally and
spiritually. People are betrayed and
abandoned. Parents fail their children
at critical moments. Yet the experience
of reading her is much warmer and
more enjoyable than that description
would suggest. Even at its darkest, her
world is fundamentally human and em-
pathetic, a place where even infanticide
can exist on the spectrum of parental
behavior—albeit way out on the edge.
Love is never finished or whole, and
neither are her people. “We’ll have
to start behaving like adults,” says a
character in one of her stories, about
a woman having a long- distance affair
with a married man. “Any idea how it’s
done?” Her characters, real and imag-
ined, are capable of the most awful
acts, but are almost never judged for
them. More often, she depicts social
transgressions with a kind of cheerful
acceptance, as in her 1984 novel The
Children’s Bach:Over the back fence, nearer the
creek, lived an old couple whom
Dexter and Athena had never
seen but whom they referred to as
Mister and Missus Fuckin’. They
drank, they smashed things, they
hawked and swore and vomited,
they cursed each other to hell and
back.They’re terrible, Garner seems to be
saying in moments like these, but at
least they’re being honest about how
they feel. Honesty—at its most un-
sparing, risky, noble, and occasionally
foolish—is the core of Garner’s work.
She has spent her entire career freeingherself from the hoops of apology and
pardon.Garner was born Helen Ford in 1942
in Geelong, a small port city about fifty
miles southwest of Melbourne. She
changed her last name when she mar-
ried her first husband, Bill Garner, an
actor—with whom she had a daughter,
her only child—and hung onto it after
their divorce in 1971, and then again
through two subsequent marriages and
divorces. She has said that “Ford was
my child name, and then my really stu-
pid, self- destructive youth name. Gar-
ner is my grown- up name.” She had
a brief but infamous career as a high
school teacher, which came to an end
in 1972 after she published an essay de-
scribing a pair of impromptu sex educa-
tion lessons she provided to a group of
thirteen- year- old students.
The lesson culminated in a student’s
asking Garner if she’d ever performed
oral sex on a man. “Yes, I have,” she
writes of her reply. “There’s a second
of amazed silence.... To break it I say
calmly, Well, I guess it is a bit hard for
you to picture me with a cock in my
mouth.” Though Garner published the
essay anonymously, that did not prevent
the inevitable. (“Of course they sacked
me,” she writes in a 1996 postscript.)
In A Writing Life, a 2017 biographical
study of Garner’s work, Bernadette
Brennan adds a delectable detail to
this incident: “She met with the school
principal, was shown his draft report to
the Department of Education and, in
typical Garner manner, corrected his
spelling.”
The story of Garner’s firing estab-
lishes early the themes of her career:
a forthright and cheerful willingness
to explore seemingly untouchable
subjects, as well as a habit of walking
blindly into trouble, driven partly by
ruthless honesty, partly by naiveté, and
partly out of an unmistakable sense of
mischief. (The recent decision to pub-
lish volumes of her private diaries while
she—along with many of the people
she writes about in them—is still very
much alive and active is clearly born of
the same tendencies.)
Finding herself with unexpected free
time after losing the teaching job, Gar-
ner started going through the diaries
she’d been keeping, with an eye to pos-
sibly drawing a book out of them. She
describes this pivotal moment in a 1996
essay called “The Art of the Dumb
Question”:At first you simply transcribe.
Then you cut out the boring bits
and try to make leaps and leave
gaps. Then you start to trim and
sharpen the dialogue. Soon you
find you are enjoying yourself....
What is it, though? Have you got
the gall to call it a novel?She did, as it turns out. As she puts it in
the same essay, “A year later, Monkey
Grip was in the shops.”
Monkey Grip, her first novel, pub-
lished in 1977, is a loosely structured
yet intense account of a young single
mom named Nora sliding through a
series of late- era hippie communal
homes in Melbourne, in love with an
intermittently charming heroin addict.
It was a best seller and brought Garner
near- instant literary fame and notori-
ety in Australia, where it is considered
a modern classic and is a touchstonefor many contemporary feminist writ-
ers. It is also the rare “counterculture
novel” that still feels immediate and
alive, thanks to Garner’s sharp, precise
prose—she has spoken of her desire to
keep the shape and speed of her prose
as close to speech as possible—and her
preternaturally wide empathy. We are
drawn into Nora’s doomed infatuation
as easily as we might that of an Austen
heroine or a member of Miss Jean Bro-
die’s set, never having to adjust for the
book’s era:I went out all day and didn’t see
him till six- thirty in the evening,
when I found him in the theatre.
His pupils were large. He did not
seem pleased to see me, and was
offhand and cold. I went home
and did four loads of washing
at the laundromat. I washed his
shirts and jeans and socks. Why
do I do it? I do it for love, or kind-
ness. Women are nicer than men.
Kinder, more open, less suspicious,
more eager to love.Some of Monkey Grip’s early re-
viewers trashed Garner for hewing too
closely to her own life, for assuming, as
one (male) critic put it, “that the reader
will share the author’s absolute fascina-
tion with herself.” Garner admitted in
a 2002 essay to going “round for years
after that in a lather of defensiveness,”
insisting that Monkey Grip is “a novel,
thank you very much,” but also that she
is “too old to bother with that crap any
more. I might as well come clean. I did
publish my diary. That’s exactly what I
did.”In the mid- 1990s Garner consum-
mated a growing obsession with trials
and court proceedings by swerving
away from fiction and into true crime.
Her first book in the genre, The First
Stone (1995), a best seller, made her a
cultural and political target by seeming
to take the side of a middle- aged male
college official accused of being inap-
propriately handsy with two young fe-
male students at a party. (In an essay
on the book and its attendant contro-
versy, Garner accused her critics of
“being permanently primed for battle”
and “read[ing] like tanks,” which prob-
ably didn’t help.)
The feminist anger at Garner eventu-
ally cooled, but the critical perception
of her as a raging literary narcissist,
stuffing each book to the margins with
herself, has persisted. Even The Spare
Room and This House of Grief, minor
masterpieces in their respective genres,
were hit with the charge of containing
Too Much Helen.
I’ve never fully understood the ten-
dency of some readers and critics to
view the interplay between an author’s
work and the facts of her life as a mat-
ter of eth ics or integr ity, as if there were
something morally greasy about draw-
ing too heavily on autobiography in
the creation of art. Anytime a literary
writer is accused of narcissism, I have
the same response as when I hear a US
president called a war criminal: well,
duh. It must be a question of degree.
All of Garner’s work, in every genre,
is open, playful, and spacious; we don’t
get smothered by her authorial self in
the way the British publisher Carmen
Callil described the effect of reading
Philip Roth: “It’s as though he’s sitting
on your face and you can’t breathe.”Also, does the truth really matter
once it’s been transformed into fiction?
Most writers’ biographies are only use-
ful for literary gossip and choice anec-
dotes. Even the best of them are rife
with confident assertions as to which
parts of an author’s life correspond
with which elements of their work.
(An Alice Munro biography from 2005
has the irritatingly presumptuous title
Writing Her Lives.) Even if you could
be 100 percent certain about a partic-
ular life- to- fiction connection, what
would you be left with? It’s like iden-
tifying a street corner where a scene
from a famous film was shot—there
may be a small thrill of recognition, but
it doesn’t tell you much about the film
itself. As Martin Amis once put it, the
ideal reader “regards a writer’s life as
just an interesting extra.”
Garner herself writes about the dis-
sociative process of inspiration in an
entry from One Day I’ll Remember
This: “It’s as if I’ve extracted or bor-
rowed from the real person the aspects
of them that I needed to struggle with,
and the character consists only of those
aspects. I can return to the real person
with no sense of overlap.”
The criticism that Garner puts too
much of herself in her work also misses
a large part of what makes her books so
good: their unnerving sense of imme-
diacy. In the essay “Woman in a Green
Mantle,” Garner mentions Philip Lar-
kin’s belief “that the urge to preserve is
the basis of all art,” adding that she has
“had it up to here with rhetoric about
art; but the urge to preserve—I under-
stand that. I’ve been a captive of it for
most of my adult life.”
What matters is what she chooses to
preserve, which is not, as in the work
of so many other autobiographical
writers, her early wounds and worries,
or the sights, sounds, and smells of her
childhood homes, but rather her life
as it is now. She keeps her experiences
alive by transforming them into living
art, not by placing them under glass.
“That’s why I write the way I write, so
that people can go there,” Garner has
said. “When you open a book, you’re
throwing yourself into the arms of a
writer. It should say, ‘I’m here! Come
in!’” In One Day I’ll Remember This
she records an exchange with her third
husband about Australia’s history:
“I’ve got no feeling for the past,” she
tells him, to which he replies, very per-
ceptively, “You’ve got a pretty strong
sense of the present, though, haven’t
you.”A strong sense of the present is the
central paradox of Garner’s published
diaries. The occasional reminders of
t he provena nc e of some of t he ent r ies —
when, for example, she expresses won-
der over a fax machine or notes the
protests in Tiananmen Square—feel al-
most like editorial insertions, as when
characters in a period movie overhear
a historically significant piece of news
on the radio. Early on in Yellow Note-
book, she writes that “a reviewer of a
collection of women’s diaries from the
late eighteenth century is surprised to
find that they’re about family affairs
and do not mention the French Revolu-
tion. I don’t find this at all surprising.”
Garner is concerned with capturing not
a moment in time but her own percep-
tion of that moment, her feelings as a
person living through it—or, more ac-
curately, stumbling through it. WhichFrazierWhitlock 42 _ 48 .indd 47 12 / 15 / 21 7 : 06 PM