Q & A with Helen Garner
Helen Garner was a high school teacher in Victoria until being sacked in 1972 for giving her 13-year-olds an unauthorised sex education lesson. From the publication of her first novel, Monkey Grip (1977) it became obvious that she was a brilliant writing talent. She followed with major publications: The Children’s Bach (1984), Cosmo Cosmolino (1992), The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) as well as many shorts tories, much journalism and reviews. She has won heaps of awards and been shortlisted and nominated for even more. This year she is hitting the headlines and bestseller lists again with The Spare Room.
Q: Can you remember or identify the thing/idea that pops into your head and it turns out to be the seed from which a book eventually grows?
A: Only one, and that was the morning in the early 1990s when I read the newspaper report of the assault charge against the Master of Ormond College – the intense curiosity aroused by this pushed me to write The First Stone.
Q: When you write “The end” – or the equivalent – are you happy? Relieved? Sad? Disbelieving?
A: First, disbelieving. When you’re writing a book you can get lost in your struggle to make it work. You think you’ll never fight your way out. The day I realized I’d finished The Spare Room I sat there staring at the screen. Then I started bawling. Then I felt as light as a feather. I jumped on my bike and rode home. All the way I thought I was going to take off, I was so free. I mean free of duty. It was glorious. It lasted twenty minutes, till I hopped off my bike on the front veranda. Then I felt ordinary again.
Q: Do you read reviews of your work? If so, when (in the cycle)? If not, why not?
A: Oh, of course I read them when they appear. I used to hope that as I got older I would care about them less, but the infantile longing for approval is enormous and it never goes away. That’s why bad reviews are so painful. You haven’t even got your normal human defences available, when a book is first published. You’ve put yourself out there in public without a skin.
Q: What do you want to do when you grow up?
A: Be a detective.
Q: Unless I’ve missed it, you’ve never written a book featuring recipes or gardening tips. Why is this?
A: I’m a puritan. I could eat the same thing every day for a week and be quite content. Naturally I love eating delicious food when it’s presented to me, but I’ve never understood the voluptuous passion for food that seems to inspire people these days. And gardening – my skills are so basic it would be ludicrous to offer advice.
Q: What do think about the state of sex education in schools?
A:I don’t know, but it’s got to be better than it was when I was a teacher.
Q: When you write, do you have a ritual before you start? (Sharpen pencil, scrub around all taps with an old toothbrush, repaint the living room...)
A: I wipe the top of the table with a rag soaked in metho. I sharpen all my 2B pencils with my red mechanical sharpener.I fill a jug with water and polish a glass with a tea towel. Then I lie down on the mat under a cotton blanket and fall asleep.
Q: What do you think of awards?
A: Great when you win, but being shortlisted produces the same unbearably infantile state I described above, in the answer about reading reviews.
Q: What’s it like having a daughter who is about to turn 40?
A: Wonderful. Funny. Comradely.
Q: “The evil women of history: Lucrezia Borgia, Imelda Marcos, Margaret Thatcher and Helen Garner.” Discuss. (Either the individual women, the concept of evil or graffiti in toilets.)
A: I’m the only one on the list who isn’t fat or over-dressed or wearing too much make-up.
Q: How did you figure out how to write a film script?
A: I thought about movies I’d liked and ones I’d hated. And I did a screen-writing workshop. I figured it was mostly about structure.
Q: You’ve written virtually everything: journalism, film reviews, fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, short stories; but not theatre. Why?
A: I haven’t got a clue how to write a play. On some level I don’t get theatre. Also I’m a realist, and I think realist theatre has been pretty much swept away by film.
Q: Was writing The Spare Room cathartic?
A: It’s been enormously relieving to realize that the anger Helen suffers from in the book is something that a lot, lot, LOT of people have experienced.
Q: Have you been surprised by any particular response to the book?
A: I’m amazed by the obsession some reviewers and journalists have displayed about whether I’m allowed to call it a novel.
Q: What are you going to do next?
A: I might go back to the courts and write about trials.
Q: Do you have a recipe and some gardening tips you could share with us?
A: If you insist. This is an almond cake called Pain de Gênes. I got it from a lady called Win McKay. It cannot fail, which is why I love it.
You need a savarin tin – shallow, and round, with a hole in the middle like a donut.
4½ oz almond meal
5½ oz caster sugar
2 oz butter
1½ oz SR flour
2 tbs cherry brandy or port or dry sherry
2 eggs
1. Butter savarin tin and dust with sugar & flour.
2. Cream butter and sugar till white.
3. Add almond meal, beaten eggs and grog: mix.
4. Fold into the SR flour.
Bake in moderate oven 20+ minutes.
Turn out, cool, dust with icing sugar.
N.B. Fast method: combine steps 2, 3 & 4 by chucking the lot (except the flour) into the blender, then fold the mixture into the flour.
