{"id":819799,"date":"2026-10-31T13:48:14","date_gmt":"2026-10-31T13:48:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/819799\/"},"modified":"2026-10-31T13:48:14","modified_gmt":"2026-10-31T13:48:14","slug":"being-hated-is-very-bracing-helen-garner-on-surviving-three-marriages-and-being-called-a-rotten-feminist-helen-garner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/819799\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Being hated is very bracing\u2019: Helen Garner on surviving three marriages and being called a \u2018rotten feminist\u2019 | Helen Garner"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, when Helen Garner<\/a> had an idea to write a book about Australian rules football, her heart soared then immediately sank. The\u00a0impetus was Ambrose, her teenage grandson, who played for a local team. Garner enjoyed watching them and wanted to put this into writing. Then the dreary thought: \u201cI\u2019ll have to swot, read the rulebook.\u201d People to whom she mentioned the idea assumed she\u2019d be writing a polemic, \u201clike what it means in society and how terrible it is and what violence means. And I\u2019m going: \u2018What a bore.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

As anyone familiar with Garner\u2019s almost 50-year writing career will know, there is nothing more igniting to the 83-year-old than the invitation to outrun boredom by going off in an unauthorised direction. Garner, who is speaking to me via video call from her home in Melbourne, occupies that tiny category of writers famous enough to be recognised in public. Stopped by strangers in the street, she\u2019s often treated to their strong views about her work. As a result, perhaps, she has perfected a very Garnerian obstinacy, enabling her to resist other people\u2019s bossy opinions which, in the case of The Season<\/a>, meant no tedious explainers about the rules, history or sociology of Aussie rules football. Instead, says Garner, she envisaged following a single season of Ambrose\u2019s U16s team, the Flemington Colts, as \u201ca\u00a0nanna\u2019s book\u201d. During publicity, she\u2019d turn up to an event at a library to find \u201cthe first five rows packed with nannas; all these white-haired women with hankies in their hands. And I feel nobody writes about nannas. I\u00a0mean, sentimentally, yes; but I want to say what they\u2019re really like.\u201d<\/p>\n

To say what something is really like is the ethos behind all of Garner\u2019s books and it has, on occasion, landed her in spectacular trouble. It has also won levels of devotion from readers who have turned her into an almost guru-like figure in her 80s, turbocharged by the publication last year of her wisdom-heavy diaries<\/a> \u2013 which won the Baillie Gifford prize \u2013 and helped, one suspects, by her ability to combine insight and erudition of the highest literary order with a style that is at times comically down to earth. (A classic example: referring to the controversy around The First Stone, the 1995 book she wrote about feminism, Garner says: \u201cI gave a lot of people the shits.\u201d It\u2019s not a line one can imagine, say, Marilynne Robinson delivering.)<\/p>\n

The current mania around Garner is a long-overdue correction for a writer who, outside Australia, was ignored and condescended to for decades. In 1987, in a typically sniffy reference to Garner in the TLS, her work was referred to as \u201cMills& Boon for bohemians\u201d, yet she is now credibly hailed as a contender for the Nobel prize, can fill 900-seat venues in New York, and has seen practically her entire back catalogue reissued in the US. (Carrie Bradshaw was shown carrying a copy of Garner\u2019s 2014 book, This House of Grief, in a scene from And Just Like That \u2026 and Dua Lipa interviewed her on her podcast.) All of which Garner shrugs off, referring to herself as an \u201cold kind of warhorse\u201d who was never interested in prizes in the first place, not least, she says, because \u201cyou have to put on that look that you\u2019re pleased for the other person\u201d, even when \u2013 a typically bracing admission \u2013 \u201ctheir book was not as good as mine\u201d.<\/p>\n

Noni Hazlehurst and Colin Friels in the 1982 film of Monkey Grip. Photograph: RGR Collection\/Alamy<\/p>\n

The fact is that Garner has always cut through the flab and waffle of so much literary culture in pursuit of something more honest. In her first novel, Monkey Grip<\/a>, published in 1977 and based on her rackety life at the time, Garner told the story of Nora, a woman with a young child living in a bohemian shared house in Melbourne and on-off dating a heroin addict called Javo. Garner had arrived at this point in her own life partly as a result of fleeing a rigid, repressed childhood in the town of Geelong near Melbourne. As the oldest of six kids, she had frequently clashed with her father, a wool merchant and \u201ca rather domineering person\u201d, she says, who bullied her meek stay-at-home mother and kept no books in the house. After attending an Anglican girls\u2019 school, Garner won a place at the University of Melbourne, where she spent the best part of three years in the pub. \u201cIt was a strange time. Once you get estranged from your parents, you go galumphing across the landscape seizing this and throwing out that. I look back and I see a lot of damage. We trampled through each other\u2019s lives.\u201d<\/p>\n

This sense of damage would become more profound in Garner\u2019s late 20s after a short-lived marriage to Bill Garner, whom she\u2019d met at college and with whom she had a daughter, Alice. The pair split up when Alice was two and Garner moved into a series of hippy shared houses. It was an unstable life that had what Garner now calls a \u201ckind of berserk quality to it \u2013 there was a lot of smashing and breaking that went on\u201d, and only became more precarious when Garner, who had been working as a teacher, \u201copened my big mouth\u201d and was fired from a school in Victoria for giving an impromptu and explicit sex education lesson. At the same time, she fell in love with a heroin addict and, a few years later, looking back over her diaries from that period, realised she wanted to write about it, embarking on Monkey Grip with the modest ambitions that enabled\u00a0its fresh, uncontrived voice. \u201cIt was a private thing, writing down in a notebook what I thought about what was happening in my life,\u201d she says. \u201cSo, I didn\u2019t compare what I had written with anything great or mighty. I\u00a0thought I\u2019d just tell the story of what \u00a0happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back now, she finds the novel \u201crather naive and undefended\u201d. But it thrills her, 50 years on, that Monkey Grip is not only still in print, but highly popular. She was in a shop, recently, \u201cand there was a young bloke who said: \u2018Aren\u2019t you Helen Garner? I\u2019m reading Monkey Grip, and we\u2019re living the life!\u2019\u201d She laughs and assumes a look of mock horror. \u201cAnd I thought: \u2018Ooh, don\u2019t do that.\u2019\u201d I\u2019d always assumed Javo had died way back, but fans of the book may be interested to know the real-life Javo is alive and well and living in Hobart, Tasmania, where he has a wife and grandchildren. After offering his spare room to Garner\u2019s own 25-year-old grandchild who was visiting that part of the world recently, he wrote to Garner, \u201cto say how marvellous it was to see our two grandchildren together\u201d.<\/p>\n

double quotation markI did feel sad. I\u00a0thought: God, everyone hates me, this is terrible. But I didn\u2019t regret it for a minute<\/p>\n

Monkey Grip, which was written with the electric, offhand energy of a young writer yet to grow self-conscious, caused a sensation in Australia and was followed by a series of short, brilliant novels, including The Children\u2019s Bach<\/a> and Cosmo Cosmolino<\/a>, before Garner pivoted to nonfiction in the mid-1990s. (She\u2019d return to fiction in 2008 with The Spare Room<\/a>, based on Garner\u2019s experience of nursing her close friend through cancer. The book has recently enjoyed an operatic adaptation in Melbourne.) And in the background, always, Garner maintained her diaries, recording her second marriage to Jean-Jacques Portail, a journalist whom she met in Paris, where she moved for a couple of years in the late 1970s while living on a writer\u2019s grant and trying to write her second novel. Portail moved back to Melbourne with Garner, and they split up in 1985. A few years later, Garner moved to Sydney to be nearer to the writer Murray Bail, the man who would become her third and (to date) final husband, and who dominates the last volume of her\u00a0diaries.<\/p>\n

Alongside entries about fashion, art, friendship, nature and the end of her marriage to Bail, the diaries offer readers a chance to witness the epic battle between Garner\u2019s extremely robust writer\u2019s ego and its near-constant collapse. A typical entry, from 1997, reads: \u201cI have to admit to myself that I feel irrelevant, small, hollow, untalented, worthless \u2013 and frightened. The energy required to maintain self-command is so great that I am always tired. How repellent one is. If only I were writing something.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019m curious about how Garner reconciles these two things \u2013 confidence and self-doubt \u2013 particularly in the wake of The First Stone, her first nonfiction book, in which she interrogated the case of two female students at the University of Melbourne who accused the master of their college of groping them. A mid-90s cause celebre in Australia, Garner foreshadowed culture wars to come by presenting the story as a possible overreaction on the part of the women, putting the boot in, she says, \u201cto what I thought was a rather punitive form of feminism. I got into a hell of a lot of trouble. Really, it was quite astonishing, the amount of hostility I copped. I was thought to be a rotten feminist; a heretic. I heard that someone on a judging panel said: \u2018If this book by Helen Garner even gets on the long list, I will\u2019 \u2026 thunderous threats \u2026\u2019\u201d Garner says: \u201cI just laughed. Because I think it\u2019s a sort of compliment.\u201d<\/p>\n

The First Stone was much more subtle and ambivalent than its detractors allowed, being a real intellectual reckoning with a complicated subject. Given the response, I\u2019ve always wondered how Garner came back from it. \u201cI had the shit kicked out of me! People savaged me. And it took me a while, but when I got over it, I thought: \u2018Well, I survived that, and now I\u2019m free. I can write what I really want. And I won\u2019t have to see if it comes out pure.\u2019 Being hated is very bracing. It\u2019s not destructive. Well, it could be; if I\u2019d published that book now \u2026 but the internet didn\u2019t exist then. I did feel miserable and sad and I thought: \u2018God, everyone hates me, this is terrible.\u2019 But I didn\u2019t regret it for a minute.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because it was the book you wanted to write? \u201cYeah. And I made mistakes in it; but I got a lot of amazing letters. I reckon I got about 800 and I answered every one. It was quite an exercise; someone would cover me with loathsome abuse and I\u2019d write back: \u2018Thank you for your kind letter \u2026\u2019 And the good letters I got were long and thoughtful, saying: \u2018I read your book and I\u2019d like to tell you something that happened to me.\u2019 And that made me think I opened up the subject for people to talk about calmly.\u201d It can\u2019t have hurt that the book was a huge bestseller. \u201cYeah, and that really gave them the shits. And they\u2019d go around saying: \u2018Oh, yes, of course Helen\u2019s motivation was purely commercial.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

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double quotation markIt\u2019s the hardest thing people ever do, being married. Harder than having kids<\/p>\n

It helped that Garner had a career in freelance journalism to fall back on, particularly when she got stuck on a book, This House of Grief<\/a>, which told the story of the trial and conviction of Robert Farquharson, who murdered his three children to get back at their mother, and which took eight years to finish while the various appeals played out. After the success of Monkey Grip, Garner dashed off a second novel, \u201cand it was crap, and my publisher correctly bounced it back. That was a nasty moment, but they were right. Just because you\u2019ve written one book doesn\u2019t mean you know how to write the next one.\u201d But while better novels followed, including The Children\u2019s Bach, published in 1984 and widely considered her masterpiece, she moved permanently to nonfiction after The First Stone, coming to specialise in a kind of literary true crime with a series of devastating books built around high-profile murder trials.<\/p>\n

That shift was brought about in part by her marriage to fellow novelist Murray Bail. Garner\u2019s account of the collapse of that marriage appears in How to End a Story, her third volume of diaries, and it\u2019s quite something; at one point, in a fury at the insidious, unfaithful Bail, she throws cups, an espresso machine and a saucepan full of beetroot soup across the kitchen. Garner writes that Bail belittled and gaslit her, and dismissed her work as inferior to his. \u201cI thought my marriage was the worst marriage in the world and I was the world\u2019s biggest wimp for going along with it,\u201d she says. Since the diaries came out, however, a lot of people have said to her \u201c\u2018that book is my marriage.\u2019 And that sort of shocks me \u2013 they\u2019re talking about a marriage they\u2019re still in. But it can be terribly difficult. I reckon it\u2019s the hardest thing people ever do, being married. Harder than having kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

She regards having her only child, Alice \u2013 at the age of 26 and without any great planning \u2013 as the greatest good fortune of her life. And the happiest she has ever been, she says, has been during these past decades of living next door to Alice and her husband and three children. Bail, meanwhile, comes out of the diaries looking very bad indeed. Any feedback from him since publication? \u201cThe answer to that is no. And either he hasn\u2019t read it or he\u2019s saying he hasn\u2019t read it. I haven\u2019t had any contact with him now since long before I published the diaries. We parted badly and painfully and it\u2019s never been mended.\u201d She sighs. \u201cHe also published a memoir in which he summed up my part in his life in about three sentences. I was roundly dismissed. And I went on like it was the collapse of civilisation. But. You know. Bless him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the relative literary reputations of Helen Garner and Murray Bail these days, she can afford to be generous. And, of course, one of the delights of the diaries is the schadenfreude of watching a man flex his superiority over a woman who will, in time, be regarded as one of the great writers of our age. Splitting up gave her just the impetus she needed, she says. \u201cI felt very liberated by no longer living in close companionship with someone who had ideas about literature which were too severe and didn\u2019t suit my work. He had this hierarchy of forms, and I subscribed to them for a long time because I\u2019d been educated to think that as well. But after I split up with him, I relaxed into being a nonfiction writer. And I stopped doing it defensively. I thought: \u2018Actually, this is my natural form.\u2019 And I still feel that very strongly: I\u2019m out here, and I\u2019m good at this, and it\u2019s really fun to do, and it gets you out of the house, rather than stewing in your own self-hatred.\u201d<\/p>\n

Judy Davis and Elizabeth Alexander in the stage adaptation of The Spare Room. Photograph: Brett Boardman\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

So it was with The Season, in which for the space of winter training Garner showed up every week at the football ground to watch her grandson and his cohorts play. Garner went through her customary period of thinking it was all a mistake, that the book was a terrible idea and she\u2019d never be able to drag it over the line. The toughest experience she ever had with this kind of self-doubt was during the writing of Joe Cinque\u2019s Consolation, her deeply affecting 2004 book about the killing of Joe Cinque, a young engineer from New South Wales whose girlfriend injected him with \u2018Get in there and do it!\u2019heroin and\u00a0was later convicted of manslaughter. \u201cI actually told Maria Cinque, his mother, that I wasn\u2019t going to\u00a0write the book. I wrote her a letter and said I\u2019m really sorry, I\u2019m going to have to give up, I can\u2019t do this. And\u00a0she rang me up and said: \u2018What do you mean you can\u2019t do it? We gave you our story, you said you were going to do it, you\u2019ll do it! Do it!\u2019 God, I nearly died of\u00a0shame. I look back on that and think you need someone who\u2019s going to kick you right up the arse. Don\u2019t you think? You don\u2019t want someone who\u2019s going to say: \u2018Oh, darling, it must be so hard, I really feel for you.\u2019 You want someone to say: \u201d<\/p>\n

This is Garner\u2019s circuit, from idea to execution via collapse, shame and eventual, dogged persistence. A few days before our conversation, Anne Carson<\/a> was announced as the winner of the Nobel Prize in literature, a decision thoroughly approved of by her Australian peer. Taped up on the wall of her office, Garner has a poem of Carson\u2019s, which she looks at in times of dire need. \u201cIf I ever had a tattoo, I\u2019d have that last line tattooed on me,\u201d she says. \u201cI just think it\u2019s so marvellous.\u201d The poem describes a stormy night at sea, fraught with peril, existential and otherwise. \u201cAnd the last line is: \u2018Nothing for it just row.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

The Season by Helen Garner is published on 5 November by W&N. To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com<\/a>. Delivery charges may apply.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few years ago, when Helen Garner had an idea to write a book about Australian rules football,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":819800,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-819799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=819799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/819799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/819800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=819799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=819799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=819799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}