Latest news with #HelenGarner
The Guardian
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Helen Garner reflects on the ‘three worst weeks of my life' caring for a dying friend
When Helen Garner arrived at Sydney's Belvoir St theatre last Wednesday, she was worried the next two hours were 'going to be gruesome'. It was opening night of the adaptation of her 2008 novel, The Spare Room, based on her experience caring for a dying friend who came to stay with her. 'They were the three worst weeks of my life, they were just unforgettably dreadful,' Garner said in conversation with Jennifer Byrne at Belvoir on Monday evening. 'I came along [to opening night] feeling that I would find it unbearable to live those three weeks again.' After the show, she crawled into bed 'exhausted'. 'I don't sleep very well now, since I got old, but I got into bed and I slept without moving for nine hours,' Garner said. 'Seeing those three weeks played out on stage resolved something in me.' In The Spare Room, the narrator, Helen, gamely agrees to host her old friend Nicola when she flies from Sydney to Melbourne to attend a cancer clinic, without realising how close to death she is. As the novel opens, Helen is preparing her spare room for her friend – fresh sheets, plumped pillows, a new rug, flowers – confident in her capabilities as a hostess and carer. This is quickly punctured by Nicola's shocking frailty and poor health, and her irrational optimism about her prognosis and the clinic's dubious treatment protocol – which turns out to be Vitamin C injections and 'ozone baths'. There follows a power struggle: Helen's fierce love for her friend gives way to excoriating rage at her delusional positivity and refusal to admit she's dying, while Nicola stubbornly resists Helen's attempts to arrange proper pain medication and palliative care. 'I was cruel to her,' Garner confessed, reflecting on her experience with her friend (Jenya Osborne, who died in 2006), adding: 'When somebody's in a trance of craziness, you want to snap them out of it – and that can make you cruel, harsh.' Belvoir's artistic director, Eamon Flack, who adapted the novel for stage, said it was Garner's frank depiction of an older woman's rage that drew him to it. Garner said she was criticised for precisely this aspect of her novel when it was first published. 'Quite a few older men criticised it because they said it was too full of anger … I was kind of shocked, actually, [because] we rage against death; there's a lot of anger in us when death is in the room.' These criticisms upset her, she admitted. 'You don't want to [be seen as] 'Oh, you're so angry.' 'Why are you so angry, Helen? You're always angry' – that's something people [have said]. Even my grandson said this to me the other day: 'Hel, you're full of anger,'' she said, rearing back in mock rage: 'I said, 'How dare you!'' Not a single woman has criticised The Spare Room for its anger, Garner said; instead, many older women thanked her for depicting the carer's experience. One full-time carer told her: 'Helen, we all feel that anger. We're all tormented by it. Don't be ashamed of it. It's part of the whole thing. You have to go there.' In Belvoir's adaptation, Helen is portrayed by stage and screen veteran Judy Davis – a performance that Garner said she found 'shattering' to watch. 'But it took me a moment to get used to it,' she said. 'I don't go to the theatre much any more. I used to go a lot – I even used to be a theatre critic in the 80s – but now I just look at movies and stuff on TV. And I'd forgotten how actory [theatre] actors are. There's such a lot of big gestures, big movements, and I thought, 'Oh my God, could you just stand still for a moment?' … I kept saying 'I would never do that. I would never run across the room like that'.' Garner said she is not generally a fan of adaptations of her work – but neither does she feel the need to be heavily involved. 'I'm happy to hand stuff over,' she said. 'I wouldn't have wanted to have anything to do with this production … I would feel that I was useless.' One exception was Ken Cameron's 1982 film adaptation of her 1977 novel, Monkey Grip, where she happened to be on set the day they were filming a scene between Noni Hazlehurst and Colin Friels after his character had overdosed. 'He says 'Sorry, Nora', and in the book she says, 'You don't have to say that' – and so Noni [said the line] and I said, 'CUT! That's so wrong. She's in a rage.' But they were going to play it in this soppy, wet [way],' Garner said. 'I'm always glad that I was there.' When Byrne said she would like to see all of Garner's books adapted for stage, Garner retorted with characteristic frankness: 'I'm telling you now, I would hate that. I mean, God, there's so much shit in there.' The audience laughed appreciatively – but the author fixed us with a gimlet eye. 'And when I die, don't think anybody's gonna get in it then, either.' The Spare Room is at Belvoir St theatre, Sydney until 13 July
The Guardian
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Spare Room review – Judy Davis is electric in thrilling adaptation of Helen Garner novel
There's real magic in the moment after the house lights go down and the stage lights go up before a play begins. There's a concert of rustled movement that slows and stops as we find our silence and attention and tune in together. In The Spare Room, Belvoir's new adaptation of Helen Garner's 2008 novel, that small ritual becomes electric. Helen – played by the indomitable Judy Davis – watches us prepare to watch her, waiting us out until we settle in. She finds the first perfect moment of silence, nods, says 'Right,' and the play begins. This keen noticing is key to Garner's writing, and the backbone of this stage adaptation. The novel, a slim and spare wonder of prose, charts the three weeks our protagonist Helen plays host to her friend Nicola, visiting Melbourne for an intensive 'alternative treatment' she believes will cure her cancer. At every step, Helen is there to witness, take notes, and try to make sense of this new, death-tinged world. As Nicola (Elizabeth Alexander, serene and softer-edged) clings to her faith in her increasingly dubious treatment and refuses to acknowledge her terminal diagnosis, Helen's ferocious love and deep-welled fury are our guides through this story of care, conflict, and the intimacy of dying. Close relationship studies are often at the heart of contemporary theatre, so it's no surprise that Garner's novel has found its way to the stage (and in more ways than one: last year, Monstrous Theatre held its second developmental workshop of an opera based on the book). Director and adapter Eamon Flack has built his career, in part, on adaptation, notably finding contemporary heartbeats in Ibsen and Chekhov. As Belvoir's artistic director, he has curated a run of theatrical seasons that dive deep into ideas of family, intimacy and belonging. The Spare Room is squarely in his sweet spot, and, with Davis as his co-conspirator, the production is a live wire: thrilling, swift, full of sparks. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning On stage, the play belongs to Davis, our direct-address narrator. She flicks a wrist, points a finger, and cellist Anthea Cottee, sitting onstage with her instrument poised and ready, begins to play. Steve Francis's score is a ticking clock, a rush of feeling and a call-and-response exchange with Davis who prowls, stalks and makes and re-makes Nicola's bed, fetching fresh sheets, water, lemonade, anything that might bring comfort. The best moments keep Garner's prose intact, little jewels of observation and ruthless honesty, and Flack carves the play out of Helen's emotional momentum: building frustration, swells of grief, and charged moments of conflict. While Nicola floats above her own experience, Helen stays grounded, on a stubborn quest to have Nicola realise that the pain and anger she refuses to acknowledge in herself have been deferred to – and are choking – Helen and anyone else in her orbit. Mel Page's set leaves plenty of room for Helen to roam and pace and think aloud. There is a reverent corner set aside for the spare room, where Nicola's bed is thoughtfully lit (by Paul Jackson, who also gentles Helen's sharper edges and suffuses the more combative scenes between Helen and Nicola with love). The set also serves as the centre of the world, transforming as needed. With the tug of a clinical curtain, Helen's home becomes the dubious Theodore Institute with its ozone tents and vitamin C infusions, a doctor's office, and a hospital. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion While the play undoubtedly and captivatingly belongs to Davis, there is lovely work from the ensemble, most notably Emma Diaz as Nicola's niece Iris and others, a seamless fit in this quick-paced production. Hannah Waterman brings a grounded presence playing characters that are allies to Helen's rational side: a no-nonsense doctor and a sister. Alan Dukes plays a variety of health professionals, both charlatans and legitimate – but is most delightful as a stage magician who brings the joy of artistic curiosity to Helen and Nicola during a rare night out together. There are a few bumps, ones common to new work. Davis's Helen is electric, the revving engine that gives power to the piece and to Garner's prose, but Nicola occasionally feels more catalyst than character, and some scenes are not yet fully calibrated – on the night I attended (reviews were rescheduled due to cast illness), you could feel the growing pains of a production still discovering itself: stumbled lines, tentative pauses. Alexander feels on the verge of blossoming. But this play has a strong foundation and good bones and Davis's fully present performance. It will sharpen as the season runs, and it is already lovely; it so frankly shares the character's darkest and lightest thoughts that it makes you feel less alone in yours. The Spare Room is at Belvoir St Theatre, Sydney, until 13 July
The Guardian
01-06-2025
- General
- The Guardian
Working from home? It's so much nicer if you're a man
I'm wary of gendered generalisations. They rightly raise hackles: we are unique, not defined by gender, not all men! But I was struck by one I read from Ella Risbridger in her review of Jessica Stanley's recent novel, Consider Yourself Kissed. Exploring one of its themes, Risbridger wrote: 'I have long noticed that in a house with one spare room and a heterosexual couple who both work from home, the spare room is where he works – with a door that shuts and perhaps even a designated desk – and she works somewhere else. (Always for good reasons, but always.)' This stopped me in my tracks. Not because it's my experience: my husband and I are lucky enough to have an office each, and mine is bigger and objectively nicer. I get the garden view; he has the ballet of Openreach and Amazon vans. (See – not all men.) It's not Stanley's experience either: she uses the spare bedroom; her husband has half the living room, she told the Cut's Book Gossip newsletter. Rather, I was struck because having just read the Australian writer Helen Garner's recently published diaries, How to End a Story, this is exactly the irreconcilable, constantly rehashed point of contention between her and her ex-husband, anonymised in the diaries as 'V'. V, also a writer, insists not only on appropriating the available room in their shared apartment for his office, but on Garner leaving while he works, her presence incompatible with his sacred need for silent isolation. Garner describes the quotidian pain of this situation (she wants to potter, play music, cook, see friends; her creativity is fuelled by these ordinary kinds of life), and the growing realisation of what it said about their relationship with shocking, powerful eloquence. V is aware of, but apparently unmoved by, her distress. They argue about it regularly. Garner's experience was so egregious as to be eye-poppingly enraging, but this happens more often in quieter, easier-to-overlook ways. I read and enjoyed Consider Yourself Kissed too – it's a romance, but it also subtly builds a picture of the insidious sidelining of women's work as expressed through domestic space. Set between 2013 and 2023, it's particularly good on how this was amplified by Covid: the heroine's political journalist husband sees his career go stratospheric and their spare room 'somehow' becomes his study. He's a nice man; he loves her; it just … happens. This rang true because it is: it did just happen. Structural pay equalities meant men – habitually the higher earners – staked the more obvious primary claim on working space in locked-down homes. Research shows women experienced more non-work interruptions, compounded when they didn't have a 'dedicated unshared workspace' – their emotional wellbeing suffered, but so did their professional lives. 'My husband locks the room from the inside when he needs to concentrate,' a participant in an Indian study on pandemic working habits reported. 'I don't have that liberty. I have no room of my own.' In 1929, Virginia Woolf wrote A Room of One's Own as a riposte to the physical and economic exclusion of women from intellectual and professional spaces. In 2025, they can't bar us from libraries, but intimate domestic spaces have proved stubbornly intractable. Back when men had inviolable studies and smoking rooms, there was an assumption that the domestic sphere was feminine, so they 'needed' to escape the noise and mess of childrearing and homemaking. Now we're ostensibly all in it together, doing conference calls in our slippers, but there are still more man caves than women's. Because Risbridger is right: the recently released UK 2024 Skills and Employment survey found 60% of men had a dedicated room for work at home and only 40% of women. We still can't manage to meet Woolf's prescription. There are not-all-men exceptions and happy endings. Garner escaped, thank God, eventually; and, without spoilers, Stanley's heroine reclaims some space. But in real life, generally, women's work is still given less and worse space, while the gender pay gap narrows agonisingly slowly. The two are surely related. When do we get that room of our own? Emma Beddington is a Guardian columnist
ABC News
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Colm Tóibín on the state of Irish literature, his favourite Australian writers and his latest novel, Long Island
Colm Tóibín — the Booker Prize-shortlisted Irish author — has already decided what he will read on the plane when he travels to Australia this week to attend the Melbourne and Sydney writers' festivals: Helen Garner's three-volume diaries. He's not the only international guest who has used the long flight from the northern hemisphere to read Garner's journals, recently published in the UK in one formidable edition. At Adelaide Writers Week, British writer Charlotte Mendelson told Kate Evans, host of ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf, that's what she read on the plane, too. "Everyone I know is reading Helen Garner," Tóibín tells ABC Arts, speaking via Zoom from his home in LA. Tóibín, who turns 70 this year, is the author of 11 novels, including The Blackwater Lightship (1999), The Master (2004) and The Testament of Mary (2013), all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He's well-versed in Australia's local literary scene, partly owing to his one-time side hustle as a publisher. In 2008, Tóibín and his agent, Peter Straus, established a small publishing imprint, Tuskar Rock Press, which published Australian authors, including David Malouf and Tim Winton, in the UK. It also published Christos Tsiolkas's The Slap, which turned out to be a barbecue stopper there in the same way it was in Australia. "Every single person that summer was reading The Slap," Tóibín says. While the likes of Tóibín and his compatriots Sebastian Barry, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney are exalted figures in Australia, Tóibín pushes back against the popular belief that Irish literature exceeds anything on offer here. "We haven't produced Germaine Greer … We haven't produced Robert Hughes. We haven't produced Richard Flanagan," he says. Nor, he says, has Ireland produced a diarist to compare with Helen Garner. In Australia, the author will attend events in Melbourne and Sydney to discuss the state of Irish literature and his latest novel, Long Island, a follow-up to 2009's much-loved Brooklyn. In Brooklyn, set in the 1950s, the young Eilis Lacey leaves her home in the Irish town of Enniscorthy — where Tóibín grew up — to emigrate to the US. Despite her homesickness, she makes a new life in New York, studying bookkeeping and becoming engaged to a charming Italian plumber, Tony Fiorello. But when she returns to Ireland to visit her family, she feels the pull of home and forms a relationship with a local boy called Jim Farrell. Long Island picks up 20 years later. It's 1976, and Eilis is living on Long Island with her husband Tony and their children, Rosella and Larry, when a knock at the door up-ends her life. She finds a man on her doorstep who angrily informs Eilis that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child. He says he will not have the baby in his house and will leave it with Tony's family to raise when it is born. Furious with Tony and suffocated by his close-knit family, who live in neighbouring houses on the same street, Eilis escapes to Ireland to visit her mother for her 80th birthday. There, she reconnects with Jim and imagines another life without Tony. Early on, Tóibín wasn't sure if Brooklyn was a novel or a long short story. He was surprised that a character like the passive, amenable Eilis captured so many readers' hearts. "There's no great heroism there. She's one of those figures who live in the shadows," he says. "She's open to suggestion, meaning people like her, but she does nothing to gain their friendship. She doesn't look in the mirror much. She just wanders about in a sort of dream. She drifts, and I was interested in that idea of drifting." Tóibín based his early sketches of Eilis on his Aunt Harriet, his mother's younger sister, who worked in the office of a mill and played golf, like Eilis's sister Rose. "But at the same time," he says, "the character is invented." Unlike Eilis, Aunt Harriet never left Enniscorthy, which allowed his imagination to take over when Eilis began her new life in the US. "That, in a way, gave me the book," he says. "If [Aunt Harriet] had [left], I would have had too much material, too much fact, too much dull business of days." Tóibín is famously critical of sequels, which he says "destroy" the original book, and he never intended to write a follow-up to Brooklyn. It was only after the idea for the sequel's premise — Eilis's unenviable predicament — lodged in his head that he found himself "drifting" into the story. While many readers relished the chance to sink into Eilis's world once again, a sequel carries the risk of displeasing a readership already invested in a beloved character, as Tóibín has discovered. He has received a surprising number of emails from disgruntled readers voicing their desire for a neater resolution to the second story. But a Hollywood ending was never on the cards. "I wouldn't have done it any other way," Tóibín says. "The problem with this novel is you cannot offer a conclusion that is satisfactory because, no matter what you do, it has to end in compromise and disappointment … I think readers wanted things to end in one way, and they were never going to end in that way, ever." Tóibín is relatively unperturbed by the feedback. "I know this is a very old argument because Henry James [the subject of Tóibín's novel The Master] had the same sort of pushback in 1881 when he published Portrait of a Lady," he says. "People thought the ending … was abrupt and unsatisfactory." It could be that Tóibín is feeling the effects of mainstream success. While Brooklyn was critically acclaimed, making the 2009 Booker longlist, the 2015 film adaptation reached a much larger audience. Brooklyn was a box office success and earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay (for writer Nick Hornby) and Best Actress (for Saoirse Ryan's commanding portrayal of Eilis). While the film hewed closely to the book, it focused on the love story — would Eilis choose Tony or Jim? — rather than the difficult choice she must make between the safe but limited world of Ireland and the possibility offered by a life far from home in the US. Tóibín, for his part, loved the film, particularly Domhnall Gleeson's portrayal of Jim. Irish characters are often presented as charming but drunk and unstable "maniacs", Tóibín says. But here was Gleeson "showing an Irishman … as stable, trustworthy, tolerant, middle-of-the-road, easy-going". "I got a lot of energy from Domhnall's performance," he says. So, how has Eilis changed in the two decades between Brooklyn's end and Long Island's beginning? Feminism, for one. "While she doesn't refer to it, it makes it all the more real and present. She isn't reading [feminist writers] Kate Millett or Germaine Greer, but something has happened to her," Tóibín says. "For example, she believes her daughter should get the same or even a better education than her son. That's a big moment to say Rosella is going to university … to study law [and Larry isn't]." This newly empowered Eilis asserts her will in other ways, like subscribing to the New York Times, which she reads at home in solitude instead of attending the Fiorello family's boisterous all-in Sunday meals. It's a bold act of independence. In staking out time for herself every week, Eilis draws a boundary with her overbearing in-laws that would be hard to imagine for the passive young woman of Brooklyn. "She's become a much more thoughtful, serious person," Tóibín says. Tóibín, the outgoing Irish Laureate for Fiction, belongs to a literary culture that's celebrated around the world. Theories abound as to why Ireland, a country of 5 million, produces so many talented writers. Some trace the inventiveness of Irish literature to the intermingling of the English and Irish languages over time. Then there's the Irish tradition of storytelling, and the effect of widespread poverty that accompanied colonisation and the 19th-century famine. "We didn't have symphonies; we didn't have Rembrandt," Tóibín says. "Paper and pen are very cheap; you don't need any resources." Also shaping the Irish literary tradition is the culture's penchant for secrecy, a product of centuries of Catholic repression. "There are a great number of things that people don't talk about in Ireland," Tóibín says. "Maybe it's true everywhere, but you notice the distance between speech and thought, and there's always a novel in that." Writers in Ireland benefit from government funding in the form of literary bursaries, a translation fund and the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) pilot scheme, which pays a living wage to eligible artists. A national arts academy, the Aosdána, also pays a stipend to its members to make sure they don't "starve", Tóibín says. When the result is a culture that produces a body of work as powerful as Tóibín's, it's an easy case to make. Colm Tóibín appears at Sydney Writers' Festival (which runs from May 19 to May 27) and in Melbourne (May 19 and May 21), presented by The Wheeler Centre and Melbourne Writers Festival.
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
How To End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner review – the greatest journals since Virginia Woolf's
When I began reading Helen Garner's How to End A Story: Collected Diaries, about to be published in Britain for the first time, I kept copying little pieces of them into the book that I keep on my desk. Here was something that was beautiful, and there was something that was wise: unable to let these jewels go, my pen scratched on and on. At a certain point, however, I had to give up. These journals run to more than 800 pages, every single one of which contains a passage of such distilled acuity and brilliance, it leaves you half drunk with exhilaration. At this rate, I thought, I'm going to end up writing out half the bloody book. How good it is in middle age to be surrounded by so many wonderful older Australian female writers: Michelle de Kretser, Charlotte Wood, Garner above all. From afar, they blow something into my life I seem to need. In the case of Garner's diaries, this may be an acknowledgment of how things truly are for women; her anger, white hot on the page even at many years' distance, makes me feel that my own is not, after all, misplaced. People say that diaries should only be published posthumously, that there's bad faith – and murderous intent on the part of the unconscious – in going ahead while you're alive. In this case, though, I have to disagree. Oh, the sheer unwavering bravery of it! Garner burned diaries dating from an earlier period than these; when an editor suggested that later notebooks might be published, she 'freaked'. But then she made a deal with herself, a pact I'm not going to call Faustian. Nonfiction is never immaculately honest. Writers, as Joan Didion said, are always selling someone out. Nevertheless, there was a way forward. She would edit, but not rewrite. If she was to leave untouched the scorching observations of other people – ex-husbands, ex-friends, her poor parents – she would also resist the temptation to spare herself. How to End a Story comprises three volumes of diaries, the last of which was published in Australia in 2021. In the first (1978-1987), Garner is basking – in as much as she's capable of basking – in the success of her first novel, Monkey Grip, and her second marriage, to a Frenchman, Jean-Jacques Portail, is ending. In the second (1987-1995), she embarks on an affair with the Australian novelist Murray Bail. In the third (1995-1998), her marriage to Bail also unravels. I should say that both these husbands, as well as her daughter and friends, are referred to only by letters that are not even their initials; thanks to this, any Australian literary gossip will be doubly lost on British readers. But her cast list is small and finely drawn: F and V and all the others quickly become characters in a novel. 'Ah, good!' you think. Here comes G. 'Oh, no!' you think. 'What's X up to now?' Two things are happening at once. First, this is a writer's notebook. It is practice, and it is an outlet for all the agonies and contortions that are born of blank paper. After a snappy session dancing to loud music (Garner loves to dance), she writes: 'Then I crash into appalling bouts of self-doubt … the fact that I still feel the need to expose, thinly disguised or barely metamorphosed, my own experience.' How hard it is to produce a raison d'être every day 'like a spider yanking thread out of its own guts'. How she trembles at her desk: 'I will never be a great writer. The best I can do is to write books that are small but oblique enough to stick in people's gullets so that they remember them.' She craves praise and yet she hardly expects it. Her capacity to absorb criticism, even spite, is awesome, especially in the months after she publishes The First Stone, a book about a sexual harassment case that has people – I mean women, mostly – blanking her in the street. Second, this is an account of a cataclysmic relationship: the sexual equivalent of the comet that's supposed to be heading towards Earth right now. By her telling – it's hard to doubt her – Bail is one of those old school, grand, manly Australians, chippy and high-minded and unyielding. From the moment he appears, you have the sickly sense she'll destroy herself by loving him as she does; that she will fold herself up like origami until she's the size of a paper pellet to be hurled into the bin. I recognised a lot of this, and many women will: the carefulness, the cringing, the feeling you're no longer yourself. It's so brutal and terrifying that as I read, I hardly remembered that Garner is now safely divorced, happily living next door to her daughter in Melbourne and celebrated as one of Australia's finest writers. All I could think was: jump before it's too late! Thank God she did not, after all, choose between her marriage and her diary (at one point, Bail sheepishly suggests that she censor herself, and desist from writing about him). These are the greatest, richest journals by a writer since Virginia Woolf's. How to End a Story: Collected Diaries by Helen Garner is published by Wiedenfeld & Nicolson (£30). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy from Delivery charges may apply
