very interesting collection of 'true stories'! such interesting writing, courageous and complex, very excited to read more of her work

5★
“ One friend of mine, a keen and discriminating reader of fiction, confessed to me, ‘I even forget the books I’ve loved the most. And it’s not through lack of concentration: I’m completely absorbed by the book as I read it—but afterwards it’s like another world that I lived in for a while, and now I’ve left it behind. I remember how I felt, but not the book itself.’”

You too? That’s certainly true of me and my memory, although there will always be characters and scenes and plot twists that stick. I remember so many little scenes from Garner's work.

This is an impossible book to review, other than to say it’s a wonderful collection of short works by one of my favourite authors. It was compiled in honour of her 75th birthday (2017) and includes three of her previously published books plus the long essay “Why She Broke”, which was published in The Monthly magazine. It’s about a migrant mother who drove her children into a lake where some drowned.

I had previously read the essay and her original story collection, also called True Stories: Selected Non Fiction, some time ago. More recently I read and reviewed Everywhere I Look (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2074615022)

In The Feel Of Steel, the "steel" refers to when she took up fencing. She has done a lot of unusual things. These are all made up of short non-fiction pieces, about everything from crime to babies to drugs to being sacked as a teacher for teaching sex in her class to kids who needed to know about it.

She goes nowhere without her notebook, and she stops in the middle of whatever she's doing to write things down. She began being interested in what is now called the True Crime genre, but for her it was sparked by following a controversial court case and writing a book This House of Grief (about a father who drove his children into a dam where they drowned). She sits in court day after day, studying all the players and getting a better insight into the story than any juror could possibly have.

She is an interesting mix of private and persistent. She’s a skilled interviewer. but she had to learn.

“As an interviewer you have to discipline your narcissism. You have to train yourself to shut up about what you did and saw and felt. You learn by practice to listen properly and genuinely, to follow with respect the wandering path of the other’s thoughts. After a while this stops being an effort. You notice that your concentration span is getting longer—longer than you ever thought it could become. Fewer and fewer things bore you. Curiosity is a muscle. Patience is a muscle. What begins as a necessary exercise gradually becomes natural.”

I like that. We do talk about exercising patience, don’t we? I never considered doing the same for curiosity, although being naturally curious, I’m interested in most people.

I read once where a man told his son to listen to everyone, because truly boring people are one in a million, and the fact they are one in a million is a reason to make them interesting. I’m not sure if Garner has ever though that, but she does seem to strike up conversations easily with anyone.

She’s an outsider who writes from the inside. In some stories about her growing up, (she was the eldest of 6), she is sometimes the ringleader around whom the action revolves and yet often felt like the odd one out, the one who didn’t fit.

You too?

And the same at university and in share houses with other (mostly) young people. Many were doing drugs (some soft, some hard), and trying to manage a household with rosters and rules. Again, she sometimes felt like the one who didn’t fit, but she writes from the heart of the inner circle and doesn’t miss a trick.

She is opinionated (and why not), and critical of poor punctuation, among other things. Just one of her pet peeves. But she is just as hard on herself, often telling anecdotes where she comes off second best.

“. . . I was reminded that I ought to keep a lid on my passion for punctuation when I bragged to my friend Tim Wintonthat I had just written ‘a two-hundred-word paragraph consisting of a single syntactically perfect sentence’. He scorched me with a surfer’s stare and said, ‘I couldn’t care less about that sort of s**t.’”

She has chronicled so much of life in Australia for the last 50 years, that when I read her stories and essays, I feel as if I’m reading my own history. Not that I spent time following cases in a maternity ward or learning the ins and outs of the morgue. No. But the families she meets could be people I knew. Their circumstances are recognisable, so I know when she’s writing about something completely outside my ken, I can trust her.

This was a particularly touching excerpt from an interview during her time in the morgue.

“‘With the SIDS babies we take extra time. We wash and powder them. And during post-mortems we’re really careful not to damage them. You feel they’ve been through enough. We rebuild and reconstruct them really carefully. Funny—when you’re holding a dead baby in your arms, you know it’s dead, but you still have the instinct to support the head, and not to let it drop back.’
. . .
‘You have to realise,’ says Jodie, ‘that what we deal with here isn’t really death. We see what’s left behind after death has happened—after death has been and gone.’”

See what I mean? She’s very much the stranger, the outsider, but people let her completely into their confidence.

“People will always tell you more than you need to know—and more than they want you to know.”

She describes an episode in the maternity ward (where she watches labour and births!):

“A beeper goes off. Five doctors dive for their belts, in curved, two-handed plunging gestures, as graceful as if they were dancing. Midwives are the sort of people you’d be glad to see come striding through the door in an emergency. Doctors too, of course—but while doctors can seem driven and head-tripping, midwives have the relaxed physical confidence of sportswomen. With their slow, wide-swinging gait, they radiate capable calm. Their professional mode is unflappability.”

After a long labour, dainty dark Mala from Madras finally has her baby. Her husband has been tender and solicitous, but once the baby is born, he begins to behave a little oddly. He tries to indicate something to the doctor, not really knowing what to say.

“He urges her to note that the baby’s skin is much lighter in colour than his or Mala’s. Nik [the registrar] stands stock still at the foot of the bed. Linda [the doctor] steps forward to the cot and leans over it. A beat. ‘His skin,’ she says clearly and carefully, ‘will darken in four to six months. As soon as the sun hits him—boom. All babies are born with light skin.’ She hovers over the baby. She looks up at Mala’s husband. Something more needs to be said. Linda swallows and takes the plunge. ‘He bears a very strong resemblance to you,’ she says. ‘Oh, very strong. Doesn’t he. Yes—the father’s the winner, with this one.’”

And you’ll be the winner if you enjoy good writing about life in general, life in particular, and the thoughts and musings of a wonderful, witty, warm, sarcastic, opinionated, fun-loving writer.

About a time she and a friend were walking along, laughing almost hysterically at a number of things, Helen writes:

“As we lurch along, sobbing with laughter, holding each other up, she gasps, ‘This reminds me of something Bill Garner said to me about you, right after you split up. He said, “If all there was to life was walking along the street, Helen’s the person I’d like to do it with.””

Same here. And I'd like her to bring her notebook.

I’m such a fan. Thanks to NetGalley and Text Publishing for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted. And thanks to Helen Garner for making such good use of her diaries and notes.

True Stories is a massive book - 800 dense pages (you have to see it in the less to appreciate it), collecting all Helen Garner's previously published short non-fiction. This spans decades. The early works date to the 1970s, the last ones were first published only a couple of years ago.

Helen Garner has created a style where fact and fiction are blended; observation and impression are interwoven. If Garner observes something - people at a health spa - then the facts and Garner's thoughts are treated as equally certain. Or, perhaps, equally subjective.

This is not a collection to read from go to whoa. It is a resource to dip into, to snatch a story or two between planes or trains.

The true stories help us see the world through curious, judging eyes. Garner is generous in her judgements, but judging nonetheless.

At 800 pages, True Stories is a massive collection of Helen Garner’s non fiction work. A few years ago, I read this Australian author’s fantastic non-fiction This House of Grief, and it made my best-of-year list. The book was emotionally wrenching, so I wasn’t ready for Joe Cinque’s Consolation. A compilation of the author’s work was enticing and promised, perhaps, a wide range of topics. I was right. In this book, Helen Garner gets everywhere: from a Russian ship that sails to the Antarctica, to the delivery room, the morgue, a gun show, the trial for the murder of Daniel Valerio, a bridal dressmaker’s shop, and a crematorium. She reminisces about an abandoned teaching career, makes observations of familial relationships, a mother sinking into dementia, moving, learning how to play the ukulele and the delights of being a grandmother.

True stories

Helen Garner is a writer who uses her writing to explore herself–something I noticed in This House of Grief. So in one section of this collection, she describes how delighted she was with her appearance right before a glass of wine lands on her dress. This sort of personal anecdote may seem uninteresting for some readers, and while it’s true that I found some essays more interesting than others, I was also interested in how Garner seeks to understand herself through her writing. For anyone interested in Helen Garner (and even if you’re never read anything by her), this is an impressive collection.

Just as when I read This House of Grief, I didn’t always agree with the author, but I always enjoyed her view on life & living. Garner’s honesty adds a great deal of delight. In Regions of the Thick-Ribbed Ice (a favourite) for example, she admits how she dislikes penguins and wanted to take an orange pebble so badly from the beach in Antarctica, but managed suppressed her desire. At another point, she admits being ambushed by her love for her new granddaugher, and in yet another section, she talks about her love for the ukulele but her lack of expertise in spite of the passage of years. At one point she chronicles the search for a round table and then how a friend’s positive attitude propped up her negative feelings about the table when a craftsman derided its quality.

There are too many chapters to talk about them all, and anyway, whoever reads this is going to have their favourites. Parts are extremely personal, and yet at the same time, there are no rants about her spouses (ex-spouses) or a litany of their failings. But I’m going to talk about the things I take away from this collection: Helen Garner’s innate curiosity about human behaviour (and that includes herself). The murder trial of little Daniel Valerio is a case in point. What on earth possessed the boy’s stepfather (the man who beat the boy to death) to “make mocking gestures, leering and waving,” to the dead child’s father? When the stepfather bragged of the beatings to coworkers, why did no one report him?

I circle round the dark area of life (mine or someone else’s) to which my curiosity is attracted, and I search for a way in.

There are a couple of wonderful essays about the author Patrick White. Patrick White: The Artist as Holy Monster is written after Helen Garner reads Marr’s biography of White. She notes “White’s periodic cullings of even his closet friends, using tiny slights or hesitations as pretexts for a ferocious slashing away of their links with him.” Garner had the good and bad fortune to meet Patrick White on two occasions, and while she remembers his kindness the first time they met, she then recalls how badly he behaved with “random, bitchy swipes” on their second meeting. Even this meeting, though, which could end in some nasty observations about White includes Garner’s realization that she allowed White to rant about people and offered no defense–“This is something worth knowing,” she admits. She also speculates about White’s companion, Manoly Lascaris, and how he managed to endure White’s temperament.

Good manners, or great art? Are the two mutually exclusive? Women and men who serve as creators, as Lascaris did, gamble their whole lives on their instincts about their partners’ abilities: a tremendous, dizzying bet.

In Sing For Your Supper, Garner writes about writers’ festivals, and the disappointment she felt when talking to a writer whose story she admired. This is magnified as Garner attends more festivals and observes that the performances of writers at festivals may not necessarily reflect the true quality of their work.

The trouble is that the attractiveness or apparent honesty of the writer is no guarantee of the quality of the work. Plenty of good writers are jerks in person, while others who are charming and generous in the flesh are boring, phoney or feeble n the page.

Finally, Garner’s pure enjoyment of Jolley planted the urge to pick up an Elizabeth Jolley novel.

‘In the middle of the journey of our life’, when we begin to start to feel the weight of the crimes we are hauling behind us, we might turn to literature for wisdom. It is not readily available, but I have always found it in Elizabeth Jolley, even before I knew what I was looking for.

This book review is a contribution for the Australian Women Writers challenge of 2018

Helen is an amazing writer and this is a huge collection of thought provoking pieces that will take you a long time to read and stay with you for even longer.

There's much to learn from Australia's leading journalist here.

‘Everything around me is seething with meaning, if I can only work out what it is .’

I want to have my own copy of this book: this collection of Helen Garner’s short non-fiction, spanning fifty years of her work. I’ve borrowed a copy from the library, had access to an electronic copy for review purposes, and I’ll be buying a hard copy of my own.

There’s something about the way in which Helen Garner translates experiences and observations into words. Some of these pieces I can identify with easily. As Ms Garner writes, in ‘The Insults of Age ’:

‘I had known for years, of course, that beyond a certain age women become invisible in public spaces.’

It’s one thing to know it, another to experience it. Sigh.

Other pieces, such as ‘Killing Daniel’ (about the murder of Daniel Valerio) and ‘Why She Broke’ (about Akon Guode driving into Lake Gladman) reduce me to tears. Ms Garner adds depth in her non-fiction short stories, illumining aspects that are rarely apparent in the frenetic media cover of these horrific events.

I’ve read many of these non-fiction pieces before: in ‘Everywhere I look’ or ‘The Feel of Steel’. And, even when the subject matter is of limited appeal to me (‘A Spy in the House of Excrement’) there’s something in Ms Garner’s writing that holds my attention.

While many of these pieces of non-fiction are about events that are external to Ms Garner (in the sense that she is primarily an observer) others are about her role as a daughter, a mother, a teacher. ‘My Child in the World’ is a beautiful account of Ms Garner watching her daughter in the schoolyard, at the edge of her social group. And her accounts of life as a grandmother are just magical!

This book and its companion, the much smaller ‘Stories: The Collected Short Fiction’, have been released as Helen Garner turns 75. Both will find a home on my bookshelf.

Note: My thanks to NetGalley and Text Publishing for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

I could barely put the book down, I was gripped from start to finish. Passionate and compelling, I can't wait to read more of the authors works.