5/13/2023 0 Comments Monkey Grip by Helen Garner![]() ![]() As a writer of nonfiction, Garner is scrupulous, painstaking, and detailed, with sharp eyes and ears. In Helen Garner’s case, we should give due thanks for the former and precisely praise the latter. Too often, we precisely monitor the former and profligately praise the latter. “Honesty” is a word that, when thrown at journalism, unhelpfully describes both a baseline and a vaguer horizon, a legal minimum and an ethical summum. With characteristic briskness, she tells us that she learned two things from him: “Firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that betrayal is part of life.” She continues, “I value it as part of my store of experience-part of what I am and how I have learnt to understand the world.” A writing lesson and a life lesson: Garner’s work as a journalist and a novelist constantly insists on the connection between writing about life and comprehending it to try to do both responsibly and honestly-without bullshit preamble, or, for that matter, bullshit amble-is what it means to be alive. ![]() In the early nineteen-sixties, when the Australian writer Helen Garner was a student at the University of Melbourne, she had a brief relationship with a twenty-four-year-old man who was her tutor. Helen Garner inspects both herself and her subjects with savage honesty. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |