A few years ago, when Helen Garner had an idea to write a book about Australian rules football, her heart soared then immediately sank. The impetus 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: “I’ll have to swot, read the rulebook.” People to whom she mentioned the idea assumed she’d be writing a polemic, “like what it means in society and how terrible it is and what violence means. And I’m going: ‘What a bore.’” As anyone familiar with Garner’s 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’s 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’s bossy opinions which, in the case of The Season, 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’s U16s team, the Flemington Colts, as “a nanna’s book”.
During publicity, she’d turn up to an event at a library to find “the first five rows packed with nannas; all these white-haired women with hankies in their hands. And I feel nobody writes about nannas. I mean, sentimentally, yes; but I want to say what they’re really like.” To say what something is really like is the ethos behind all of Garner’s 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 – which won the Baillie Gifford prize – 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: “I gave a lot of people the shits.” It’s not a line one can imagine, say, Marilynne Robinson delivering.) 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 “Mills& Boon for bohemians”, 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’s 2014 book, This House of Grief, in a scene from And Just Like That … and Dua Lipa interviewed her on her podcast.) All of which Garner shrugs off, referring to herself as an “old kind of warhorse” who was never interested in prizes in the first place, not least, she says, because “you have to put on that look that you’re pleased for the other person”, even when – a typically bracing admission – “their book was not as good as mine”. 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, 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 “a rather domineering person”, she says, who bullied her meek stay-at-home mother and kept no books in the house.
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