Helen Garner - Free Library Land Online - Biography

One Day I'll Remember This

Wed, 01 Jan 2020 10:25:52 +0200

Helen Garner's second volume of diaries charts a tumultuous stage in her life. Beginning in 1987, as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming, and ending in 1995 with the publication of The First Stone and the bombshell that followed it, Garner reveals the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work.

With devastating honesty, she grapples with what it means for her sense of self to be so entwined with another—how to survive as an artist in a partnership that is both thrilling and uncompromising. And through it all we see the elevating, and grounding, power of work.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier's Book Award. In 2019 she was honoured with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature, and...

How to End a Story

Sat, 09 Jan 2021 00:41:12 +0200

Helen Garner's third volume of diaries is an account of a woman fighting to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her.
Living with a great writer who is consumed by his work, and trying to find a place for her own spirit to thrive, she rails against the confines while desperate to find the truth in their relationship—and the truth of her own self.

This is a harrowing story, a portrait of the messy, painful, dark side of love lost, of betrayal and sadness and the sheer force of a woman's anger. But it is also a story of resilience and strength, strewn with sharp insight, moments of joy and hope, the immutable ties of motherhood and the regenerative power of a room of one's own.

Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and works of non-fiction. In 2006 she received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature, and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham–Campbell Literature Prize for non-fiction and the Western Australian Premier's...

Yellow Notebook

Wed, 27 Nov 2019 19:28:30 +0200

Helen Garner has kept a diary for almost all her life. But until now, those exercise books filled with her thoughts, observations, frustrations and joys have been locked away, out of bounds, in a laundry cupboard.
Finally, Garner has opened her diaries and invited readers into the world behind her novels and works of non-fiction. Recorded with frankness, humour and steel-sharp wit, these accounts of her everyday life provide an intimate insight into the work of one of Australia's greatest living writers.
Yellow Notebook, Diaries Volume One, in this elegant hardback edition, spans about a decade beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip. It will delight Garner fans and those new to her work alike.
'Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. She is everywhere at once, watching and listening, a recording angel at life's secular apocalypses...her...

The Children's Bach

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 11:55:54 +0200

Athena and Dexter lead an enclosed family life, innocent of fashion and bound towards a disturbed child. Their comfortable rut is disrupted by the arrival of Elizabeth, a tough nut from Dexter's past. With her three charming, chaotic hangers-on, she draws the couple out into a world whose casual egotism they had barely dreamed of. How can they get home again?

True Stories

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:55:55 +0200

Winner of the 1997 Kibble Award for Literature, True Stories spans twenty-five years of work by one of Australia's great writers.In this extraordinary collection of non-fiction stories, Helen Garner visits the morgue and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She watches women giving birth and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning fifty and about the storm caused by her book The First Stone. Her story on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio wins her a Walkley Award.Garner looks at the world with a shrewd and sympathetic eye. Her non-fiction, with its many voices, is passionate and compelling. 'Helen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia.' Bulletin

The Feel of Steel

Fri, 17 Nov 2000 11:55:56 +0200

"Although I have been married three times, I have never been a bride. What – me, in a big white dress? In a veil? The closest I ever got to the fantasy was back in the eighties, when I used to admire the white gypsophila crowns that Susan Renouf wore to parties: I drew a curious satisfaction from their ethereal, circular, brow-pressing beauty. Twenty years later all that's left is the frisson I get from the coronet shape that salad leaves briefly take when I tip them out of the whizzer on to a tea towel."Cities, friends, lost loves, Antarctica, the joy of being a grandmother, weddings, fencing... Such is the array of subjects in Helen Garner's second non-fiction collection. Some pieces were published in The Age, some are previously unpublished, but woven together they present as an evocative memoir, and offer a wonderfully personal portrait of an always unconventional talent.In word-perfect and often hilarious prose, Helen Garner reminds us of the...

Joe Cinque's Consolation

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 11:55:53 +0200

NOW A CRITICALLY ACCLAIMED MOTION PICTURE

A true story of death, grief and the law

"Garner's book is a writer's profound response to a tragedy and to questions about human responsibility over time as well as at precise moments" The AgeIn October 1997 a clever young law student at ANU made a bizarre plan to murder her devoted boyfriend after a dinner party at their house. Some of the dinner guests-most of them university students-had heard rumours of the plan. Nobody warned Joe Cinque. He died one Sunday, in his own bed, of a massive dose of rohypnol and heroin. His girlfriend and her best friend were charged with murder. Helen Garner followed the trials in the ACT Supreme Court. Compassionate but unflinching, this is a book about how and why Joe Cinque died. It probes the gap between ethics and the law; examines the helplessness of the courts in the face of what we think of as 'evil'; and...

Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice

Wed, 17 Nov 1999 11:55:55 +0200

They say that tourist ships to Antarctica, even more than ordinary human conveyances, are loaded down with aching hearts. Deceived wives and widowers, men who've never been loved and don't know why, Russian crew forced to leave their children behind for years at a time ... And then there are the married couples: how calm the old ones, how eager the new! – but isn't a couple the greatest mystery of all?
Regions of Thick-Ribbed Ice is the tale of a journey to Antarctica aboard the Professor Molchanov. With unmatched eloquence, Helen Garner spins a tale of ships, icebergs, tourism, time, photography and the many forms of desolation.
Short Blacks are gems of recent Australian writing – brisk reads that quicken the pulse and stimulate the mind.
Helen Garner has written novels, short stories, screenplays and many acclaimed works of journalism. She was the recipient of the 2006 Melbourne Prize for Literature. Her books include Monkey...

The First Stone

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 11:55:57 +0200

In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The shock of these charges split

The Spare Room

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 11:55:56 +0200

Winner of the Victorian and Queensland Premier's Literary Awards for Fiction. The Spare Room is an extraordinary work of fiction from one of Australia'sbest-selling and most admired writers.Helen lovingly prepares her spare room for her friend Nicola. She is coming to visit for three weeks, to receive treatment she believes will cure her cancer. From the moment Nicola staggers off the plane, gaunt and hoarse but still somehow grand, Helen becomes her nurse, her guardian angel and her stony judge.The Spare Room tells a story of compassion, humour and rage. The two women-one sceptical, one stubbornly serene-negotiate an unmapped path through Nicola's gruelling therapy, stumbling towards the novel's terrible and transcendent finale.'A perfect novel, imbued with all Garner's usual clear-eyed grace but with some other magnificent dimension that hides between the lines of her simple conversational voice. How is it that she can enter this heart-breaking...

Honour & Other People's Children

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 11:55:54 +0200

In Honour & Other People's Children, Helen Garner examines the idiosyncratic and bothersome notions of honour by which her characters - adults and children - shape their untidy lives.
Honour is about a couple whose marriage, though abandoned in practice, persists in spirit. But the arrival of a new lover obliges them to make a proper separation and draw their child into the conflict.
Other People's Children is a witty, sad story of the breakdown of friendship between two women, Scotty and Ruth, and the collapse of their collective household. Scotty loves Ruth's daughter as only the childless can love other people's children, but the broken friendship leaves Scotty with no claims. Into this mess blunders Madigan, looking for something that Scotty has long ago trained herself not to give.

This House of Grief: The Story of a Murder Trial

Mon, 17 Nov 2014 11:55:54 +0200

Cosmo Cosmolino

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 09:18:11 +0200

'Helen Garner writes the best sentences in Australia.' BulletinJanet is a skeptic, a journalist; Maxine revels in New Age fantasies; and Ray, a drifter, is a born-again Christian. The common ground is the house they share. But their fragile domestic balance is about to explode amid the smashing of ukeleles, an unexpected ascension of an angel, and a sudden shower of jonquils.Introduction by Ramona Koval. Helen Garner was born in 1942 in Geelong, and was educated there and at Melbourne University. Her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977, won the 1978 National Book Council Award, and was adapted for film in 1981. Since then she has published novels, short stories, essays, and feature journalism. In 2006 Helen Garner received the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature.Ramona Koval is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. She is the editor of Best Australian Essays and for many years was the presenter of ABC Radio...

Monkey Grip

Sun, 17 Nov 2013 11:55:53 +0200

Inner-suburban Melbourne in the 1970s: a world of communal living, drugs, music and love. In this acclaimed first novel, Helen Garner captures the fluid relationships of a community of friends who are living and loving in new ways.Nora falls in love with Javo the junkie, and together they try to make sense of their lives and the choices they have made. But caught in an increasingly ambiguous relationship, they are unable to let go - and the harder they pull away from each other, the tighter the monkey grip.'A lyrical, rough-edged novel full of warmth and uncompromising feeling' The Sunday Age