Wrise first and kill3/23/2023 She is also the model of a writer who just keeps getting better. She’s a prodigious blurber, and that makes a big difference to those starting out. Helen has been incredibly generous to a lot of younger writers, offering friendship and guidance. Noni Hazlehurst and Colin Friels in Monkey Grip. The other thing is the female voice: here’s a woman we’ve followed through her ageing process, which is really interesting, because older women are often invisible.In Canada, Joni Mitchell was made poet laureate it would be wonderful if someone like Helen could be honoured in such a way. She’s happy to say she often falls short of her own expectations, which a lot of us are not prepared to admit openly. That self-examination is the universal resonance, when you see someone interrogate themselves as closely as that. Helen is a sponge, always looking for things that prompt her to make her think and feel – particularly feel. She was one of many teachers that validated that instinct for me and she was probably one of the first. It made me feel okay about being vulnerable. She was just a hallmark of that honesty and openness and willingness to let us go inside her head without artifice. Some of the early criticism she received for writing about the minutiae of daily life implied that was somehow less important, whereas I think that is the beating heart of what makes us human. Helen introduced me to female writers – I’d had a conventional education where only male writers were honoured with their lofty themes. I read Monkey Grip when I heard they were making a film and went in to audition for one of the other women director Ken Cameron and producer Pat Lovell decided that I was Nora. We asked an array of people about her work and impact and why she is, as one of them notes, “the model of a writer who just keeps getting better”. This week, the author who’s “happy to say she often falls short of her own expectations” turned 80. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text sizeĪ prodigious blurber, our breaker of horses, and a poet in plain prose there are myriad ways Helen Garner is described by the Australian writers and others on whom she has had a profound influence.
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