"At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.""But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.""But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.""But there are some wounds that can never be healed.""I like poking my nose into other people's lives.""I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.""I think writers are very anxious.""I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.""It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.""It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.""Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.""People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.""That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.""The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.""We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.""Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.""Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves."
Garner was born in Geelong, Victoria, the eldest of six children. She attended Manifold Heights State School, Ocean Grove State School and then The Hermitage in Geelong. She went on to study at the University of Melbourne, residing at Janet Clarke Hall, and graduating with a Bachelor of Arts with majors in English and French.
Between 1966 and 1972 Garner worked as a high-school teacher at various Victorian high schools. During this time, in 1967, she also travelled overseas and met Bill Garner, whom she married in 1968 on their return to Australia. Her only child, the actor, musician and writer Alice Garner, was born in 1969, and her marriage ended in 1971.
In 1972, she was sacked by the Victorian Department of Education for "giving an unscheduled sex-education lesson to her 13-year old students at Fitzroy High School". The case was widely publicised in Melbourne, bringing Garner a degree of notoriety.
Garner married two more times: Jean-Jacques Portail (1980—85) and Australian writer Murray Bail (born 1941). She is no longer married.
In 2003 a portrait of Helen Garner, titled True Stories, painted by Jenny Sages, was a finalist in the Archibald Prize.
Garner came to prominence at a time when Australian writers were relatively few in number, and Australian women writers were themselves something of a novelty. Australian academic and writer, Kerryn Goldsworthy, writes that "From the beginning of her writing career Garner was regarded as, and frequently called, a stylist, a realist, and a feminist".
Her first novel, Monkey Grip (1977), relates the lives of a group of welfare recipients living in student-style accommodation in Melbourne. Years later she stated that she had adapted it directly from her personal diaries. The book was very successful: it won the National Book Council Award in 1978 and was turned into a film in 1982. In fact, Goldsworthy suggests that the success of Monkey Grip may well have helped revive the careers of two older but largely ignored Australian women writers, Jessica Anderson and Thea Astley. Thea Astley wrote of the novel that "I am filled with envy by someone like Helen Garner for instance. I re-read Monkey Grip a while ago and it's even better second time through". Critics have retrospectively applied the term Grunge Lit to describe Monkey Grip, citing its depiction of urban life and social realism as being key aspects of later works in the sub-genre.
In subsequent books, she has continued to adapt her personal experiences. Her later novels are: The Children's Bach (1984) and Cosmo Cosmolino (1992). In 2008 she returned to fiction writing with the publication of The Spare Room, a fictional treatment of caring for a dying cancer patient, based on the illness and death of Garner's friend Jenya Osborne. She has also published several short story collections: Honour & Other People's Children: two stories (1980), Postcards from Surfers (1985) and My Hard Heart: Selected Fictions (1998).
In 1984, Australian academic and critic, Don Anderson, wrote of The Children's Bach: "There are four perfect short novels in the English language. They are, in chronological order, Ford Maddox Ford's The Good Soldier, Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises and Helen Garner's The Children's Bach." The Australian composer Andrew Schultz wrote an opera of the same name which premiered in 2008.
Helen Garner said, in 1985, that writing novels was like "trying to make a patchwork quilt look seamless. A novel is made up of scraps of our own lives and bits of other people's, and things we think of in the middle of the night and whole notebooks full of randomly collected details". In an interview in 1999, she said that "My initial reason for writing is that I need to shape things so I can make them bearable or comprehensible to myself. It's my way of making sense of things that I've lived and seen other people live, things that I'm afraid of, or that I long for".
Not all critics have liked Garner's work. Goldsworthy writes that "It is certainly the case that Garner is someone whose work elicits strong feelings ... and people who dislike her work are profoundly irritated by those who think she is one of the best writers in the country". Novelist and reviewer, Peter Corris wrote in his review of Monkey Grip that Garner "has published her private journal rather than written a novel" while Peter Pierce wrote in Meanjin of Honour and Other People's Children that Garner "talks dirty and passes it off as realism". Goldsworthy suggests that these two statements imply that she is not really a writer. Craven, though, argues that her novella, The Children's Bach, "should put paid to the myth of Helen Garner as a mere literalist or reporter", arguing, in fact, that it "is light years away from any sprawling-tell-it-all naturalism, [that] it is concentrated realism of extraordinary formal polish and the amount of tonal variation which it gets from its seemingly simple plot is multifoliate to the point of being awesome".
Themes
Most of her novels address "sexual desire and the family", exploring "the relationship between sexual behaviour and social organisation; the anarchic nature of desire and the orderly force of the institution of 'family'; the similarities and differences between collective households and nuclear families; the significance and the language of housework; [and] the idea of 'the house' as image, symbol, site and peace."
Craven comments that Garner is "always an extremely accurate writer in terms of the emotional states she depicts".
She has written three screenplays: Monkey Grip (1982), written with and directed by Ken Cameron; Two Friends (1986), directed by Jane Campion for TV; and The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992), directed by Gillian Armstrong.
Critic Peter Craven writes that "Two Friends is arguably the most accomplished piece of screenwriting the country has seen and it is characterised by a total lack of condescension towards the teenage girls at its centre".
Garner has written non-fiction from the beginning of her career as a writer. In 1972 she was fired from her teaching job after publishing in The Digger, a counter-culture magazine, an anonymous account of frank and extended discussions she had with her students about sexuality and sexual activities. She wrote for this magazine from 1972 to 1974. In 1993, she won a Walkley Award for her TIME magazine account of a murder trial following the death of a toddler at the hands of his stepfather.
One of her most famous and controversial books is The First Stone (1995), an account of a 1992 sexual harassment scandal at Ormond College. This book was a best-seller in Australia, but also attracted considerable criticism. Garner's other non-fiction books are: True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction (1996), The Feel of Steel (2001) and Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004). She also contributed to La Mama, the Story of a Theatre (1988).
