True Stories

Helen Garner

True Stories
Format
Paperback
Publisher
Text Publishing Co
Country
Australia
Published
29 October 2018
Pages
656
ISBN
9781925773194

True Stories

Helen Garner

Helen Garner visits the morgue, and goes cruising on a Russian ship. She sees women giving birth, and gets the sack for teaching her students about sex. She attends a school dance and a gun show. She writes about dreaming, about turning fifty, and the storm caused by The First Stone. Her stories on the murder of the two-year-old Daniel Valerio and Akon Guode, the mother who drove her children into a lake, won her two Walkley Awards.

Garner looks at the world with a shrewd and sympathetic eye. Her non-fiction is always passionate and compelling. True Stories is an extraordinary book, spanning forty years of work, by one of Australia?s great writers.

Review

I know I’m not the only Melbourne writer whose motto, at my laptop, is WWHGD (what would Helen Garner do?). From Monkey Grip – Readings’ first Australian bestseller – to last year’s collected non-fiction, Everywhere I Look, Garner has dominated the shelves of local book-lovers, and continually redefined what a writer can do, particularly in terms of the tightrope line she treads between fiction and non-fiction, simply by writing her stories in her own distinctive way, seemingly ignoring the constrictions of genre until it’s time to publish and classify. These two beautiful hardback collections celebrate Garner’s 75th birthday.

It’s telling that, genre-busting aside, True Stories is approximately three times the size of Stories. This mammoth book begins with a stunning new piece, ‘Why She Broke’, exploring the case of the traumatised Sudanese widow and mother of six who drove her car into a lake, killing three of her children – with Garner’s trademark blend of intelligence, insight, radical empathy and careful research. It’s made more poignant and essential by her background with the eerily similar Robert Farquharson case, as documented in This House of Grief. ‘My Child in the World’, a starkly beautiful account of watching her young daughter skirt the edges of her schoolyard social group, snagged at my heart. Three books are collected here: True Stories, The Feel of Steel and Everywhere I Look.

The much slimmer Stories collects 14 of Garner’s best short stories, including the iconic ‘Postcards from Surfers’. She is here, too – as vividly, sometimes more, than in the ‘true’ stories. In ‘My Hard Heart’, an emotionally resonant story about being blindsided by divorce, and its attendant grief, we see glimpses of what will manifest in Cosmo Cosmolino, and only-Helen-Garner images like ‘when I sat on a cushion on the doorstep and played my ukulele I saw that the flower clumps were full of bees’.

These are books to treasure and revisit. Happy birthday, Helen.

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