Latest news with #HelenGarner
The Guardian
3 days ago
- 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
Washington Post
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Helen Garner's diaries match her fiction in their brilliance
Several years ago, the Australian writer Helen Garner admitted, to the horror of biographers everywhere, that she had incinerated years of her private diaries in a backyard bonfire. Garner, who is considered a living legend in her native country, had become 'bored' while reading page after page about her younger self's 'droning sentimental concerns,' so she fed them into a barbecue. Then she reached the diary for 1978 — when she was 36 years old — and the entries seemed to shift into a less-embarrassing register. She stopped the conflagration. Eventually, she decided to publish some of the remaining diaries. In Australia, three volumes have appeared in print, and now Pantheon, as part of its welcome effort to reissue Garner's best works and promote her to an American readership, has released a single edition, 'How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998.'
New York Times
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘My 10,000 Hours': The Diaries That Made Helen Garner a Writer
The Australian writer Helen Garner's fiction has long been prized by people whose taste I trust. Yet when I've picked up her novels, I've bounced off them, like a spacecraft that has botched re-entry into the earth's atmosphere. Every reader must have a writer or two like this, ones they sense they should like but do not. Garner's work has seemed, in my brief encounters with it, thin and in want of polish. Now comes 'How to End a Story,' a barbell-weight book that collects three volumes of her diaries from 1978 to 1998, beginning in her mid-30s. At more than 800 pages, this a lot of Garner (no relation). I almost put this one down, too, because it gets off to a tentative and makeshift start. Book critics, like people who work in publishing, are always looking for an excuse to stop reading. But after a while I began to sync with her voice. By a quarter of the way in, I was utterly in her hands. Mea maxima culpa. This is one for the introverts — the wary and the peevish, the uncertain of their looks, taste, talent and class status. Garner has an ideal voice to express late-night pangs of precariousness and distress, some more comic than others. Her prose is clear, honest and economical; take it or leave it, in the Australian manner. She is, in her telling, the kind of person who gets mistaken for the staff at book festivals. People walk up to her out of the blue and ask, 'What's the matter?' (This is a special hatred of mine, too.) She fears for her table manners. Photographers say things to her like, 'Your profile, it is not the best.' If you have ever looked at a photograph of yourself and were floored by your own unsightliness, well, Garner is a laureate of this experience: Her sense of unworthiness extends to her own writing. 'I'm just a middle-level craftswoman,' she writes. And: 'Grief is not too strong a word for what one feels before one's own weakness and mediocrity.' She battles nuclear-grade levels of impostor syndrome. Writers have kept diaries for myriad reasons. Anaïs Nin wished to taste life twice. Patricia Highsmith longed to clarify 'items that might otherwise drift in my head.' Anne Frank wanted to go on living after her death. Sheila Heti felt that if she didn't look at her life closely she was abandoning an important task. These are Garner's instincts, too. But she also says, charmingly: 'Why do I write down this stuff? Partly for the pleasure of seeing the golden nib roll over the paper as it did when I was 10.' This writing served a more serious purpose. Garner told The Paris Review: 'The diaries are how I turned myself into a writer — there's my 10,000 hours.' The quotidian details of life shine in this book — her pot plants, shopping trips ('Kmart, fount of all goodness'), dinner parties, washing her knickers in a bucket, defleaing a dog, mending a skirt, going to the movies, keeping a copy of 'Paradise Lost' in the outdoor bathroom. Sometimes she lives in small urban apartments, and at others in a rural house where she sees koalas and kangaroos and eagles and kookaburras. Here is her report of one meal out: 'At the hippies' house for dinner, I find in my slice of quiche two foreign items: a dead match and a pubic hair. I hide them under a lettuce leaf and we go on talking.' Her lit talk is ardent and adept: 'Sentimentality keeps looking over its shoulder to see how you are taking it.' 'Emotion,' though, doesn't care 'whether anyone's looking or not.' She appraises the blast zone around certain bores. About a dinner with academics, she writes: 'Spare me from old men's calm assumption that anything they say, no matter how dull, slow or perfunctory, deserves and will have an audience.' This book does not need an injection of drama, but one arrives. After two failed marriages, Garner enters a relationship with a thorny, and married, male writer whom she calls 'V.' (He is the novelist Murray Bail.) They eventually marry, and his needs crowd out her own. She begins to feel like an intruder in her own apartment. He's the one who gets to write there, while she must go elsewhere to work. He's jealous of whatever success she has. Which is the host and which is the parasite? He commences an affair with another woman, a painter, and he prevaricates and lies. Garner pretends, for months, not to notice. She hangs on longer than you would think possible. It becomes harrowing. Their relationship is the mortar in which she is nearly ground into paste. 'For the first time,' she writes, 'I begin to understand the women who stay with men who hit them.' Work is her salvation and her bridge to the world. My plan is to return to her other books, and to wade in, this time, further than my ankles.
