Helen Garner Hacking Away at the Adverbs: A Novel Dialogue Crossover Conversation

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Helen Garner Hacking Away at the Adverbs: A Novel Dialogue Crossover Conversation
Date: February 19, 2026
Host: John Plotz
Guests: Helen Garner (author), Elizabeth McMahon (Professor, University of New South Wales)

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Overview

This episode features a spirited and insightful conversation with celebrated Australian writer Helen Garner, best known for her novels and nonfiction (including Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, The Spare Room, The First Stone, and This House of Grief). Garner engages in a deep, reflective dialogue about her writing craft, the role and construction of "home" in her works, influences, the process and significance of her diaries, and her ongoing quest for clarity, minimalism, and meaning in storytelling. Literary critic Elizabeth McMahon and host John Plotz gently probe Garner’s methods, life story, and intellectual formation, bringing out candid moments, memorable anecdotes, and practical wisdom for writers and readers alike.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Art of Paring Back: Cutting to What's Essential

• Minimalism, Gaps, and the Reader’s Role

  • Garner is celebrated for her spare, crystalline prose. McMahon notes the "gaps" in her writing, where both presence and absence create meaning.
  • Helen Garner (on her process):

    “I’m really good at keeping scraps of things and figuring out ways to fix them together… I write one sentence, and then I’ll write another. And at a certain point… I can see a place where I can use them.” [08:36]

  • The act of cutting back is both a formal and emotional discipline. Helen describes how fragments of real life—overheard snatches, observations—are captured in diaries and later woven into fiction, sometimes after years.

• Hacking Out the Adverbs

  • On advice from a German creative writing teacher, Garner removed adverbs from her work and found the result liberating and the prose cleaner:
  • Notable quote:

    “I’m going to hack the adverbs out of this… pretty soon I was like ankle deep in adverbs and I felt so overjoyed by that… The fatness seems to issue from my anxiety and … the inability to believe that the reader’s gonna go there… that the reader… will furnish that room so I don’t have to furnish it.” [35:35]

• Influence of Editors and Minimalism

  • Garner praises Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish for demonstrating the power of “what you can do with so little,” citing Lish’s removal of sentimental “mush.”

Memory, the Strange Days of Creation, and the Mystery of Authorship

• Distance from One’s Own Work

  • Garner experiences profound estrangement from some of her books, especially The Children’s Bach:

    “Sometimes I look at it and I don’t remember writing it. It’s as if someone else, some other person called Helen Garner, wrote this book.” [08:36]

• The "Blessed State" of Writing

  • She recounts a jazz musician:

    “When I play badly, it’s my fault. When I play well, it’s got nothing to do with me.”
    Garner resonates with this, noting that in the midst of the writing process, it often felt like hard labor, not inspiration; only retrospectively does the work seem to arise from mystery or grace. [13:00]

The Significance of Homes and Domestic Spaces

• Perpetual Restlessness and Attachment

  • Both Garner’s personal history and her fiction are characterized by movement, reinvention of “home,” and domestic experimentation.

  • She recounts her father's “restless” compulsion to move, often on a whim, and the toll it took on her mother.

  • Helen Garner:

  “I sat down recently and made a list of all the houses I’d lived in…it came to 27. And…gave me quite a shock.” [17:09]

• Households as a Central Motif

  • Garner observes (sometimes unconsciously) that households, share houses, and domestic life are predominant subjects because “they’re just so endlessly interesting.” [21:28]

  • She reflects on dreams of discovering extra wings or attics in familiar houses, connecting this recurrent dream motif to her writing.

Theory, Practice, and the Failure of Ideals

• The 1970s, Feminism, and Social Experimentation

  • She describes the idealistic share house environments of the era, motivated by feminist and leftist ambitions to transcend traditional domestic roles—often with mixed results:

  • Helen Garner:

    “We thought that feminism was going to change the world… we hoped it was possible to make a household that wouldn’t have the kind of rigid roles that our parents and our childhood had…” [22:38]

  • The reality often fell short, complicated by interpersonal entanglements and a notable absence of psychological (as opposed to political) theory.

• Psychology and Cultural Attitudes

  • Garner and McMahon note that, even today, psychoanalytic or therapeutic approaches are less ingrained in Australian culture than, for example, in the U.S. or Europe.

  • Helen Garner:

    “People who despise psychotherapy… it seems so sort of terrible and brutal and sad really.” [26:22]

• Fiction as Psychological Theory

  • Plotz suggests that novels themselves can be a kind of psychological inquiry, to which Garner agrees, saying they allow us “to enter another person’s psyche… the psyches of the characters are so endlessly fascinating.” [27:19]

Reading, Writing, and the Influence of Others

• Difficulties of Reading During Lockdown

  • Garner reveals that, during pandemic lockdowns, she found reading unusually difficult despite her life-long dependence on books, and turned to work on her diaries or television instead.

• Literary Influences

  • Garner hesitates to name direct influences, attributing her style to both “dry, restrained” British writing and “noisier, more rambunctious” American literature.

  • She expresses particular admiration for Raymond Carver ("thunderstruck” by his minimalism), Philip Roth (“awe striking” – but not a model), Chekhov, Tolstoy, and Marilyn Robinson.

  • On Carver and editing:

    “What Lish got rid of [in Carver’s work] was that sort of mush of the drunk… He just stripped that right out.” [31:28]

• References to Willa Cather and Hemingway

  • Discussion of Cather’s “novel démeublé” (novel stripped of furniture) and Hemingway’s advice that what you cut from a text is still felt by the reader. [33:01]

Diaries: Material, Process, and Publication

• Ten Thousand Hours

  • Garner describes her decades of diary writing as the “10,000 hours” necessary to develop skill in any art, noting that the shift from private anguish to observation marked the point where her diaries became not just practice but source material. [39:03]

  • Helen Garner:

    “Editing the diary for publication was a painful process and humiliating in many ways, but I could see that what this was and what it amounted to was my 10,000 hours…”

• Different Notebooks for Different Material

  • She distinguishes between the analytical diary, a working journal for book projects, and a small notebook for overheard material, noting the difference between processing her emotional experience and logging the “music” of the world. [41:47]

The Metaphor and Music of Writing

• Music as Order in Chaos

  • Garner, an admirer of Bach, describes music (and the practice of learning music) as both a metaphor and a tonic for her writing, providing a model of order, structure, and harmony. [44:26]

  • On Bach:

    “Bach’s keyboard music particularly is, to me, the absolute peak of civilization…You just listen to that music… and it still makes you feel that there is such a thing as meaning or that everything isn’t chaos…”

• Sentence as Music

  • She equates the rhythm, balance, and “shape” of a sentence to music—constantly seeking the right “forward surge” and “punctuation” as musical elements.

• Imposing Order on Disorder

  • Writing about disorderly, chaotic worlds (as in Monkey Grip or The Children’s Bach) is an act of giving shape to the unshaped, a response to her own fear of chaos.

Writers’ Rituals and Sisyphean Refreshment

• On Writing Rituals
  • Asked about comforting treats while writing, Garner replies:

    “I go and have a facial… it’s looking for, once again, a quiet thing where nobody’s talking and somebody’s doing nice things to me in a physical way…” [48:46]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Writing and Memory:

  “Sometimes I look at it and I don’t remember writing it. It’s as if someone else, some other person called Helen Garner, wrote this book.” (Helen Garner, 08:36)

• On Literary Minimalism:

  “I’m gonna hack the adverbs out of this… pretty soon I was like ankle deep in adverbs…” (Helen Garner, 35:35)

• On Households:

  "Why wouldn’t I write about [households]? Because they’re just so endlessly interesting." (Helen Garner, 21:28)

• On Diaries as Practice:

  “Editing the diary for publication was quite painful… but I could see… it was my 10,000 hours… and the thing I love the most is messing around with a pen on a bit of paper.” (Helen Garner, 39:03)

• On Literature as Psychology:

  “Novels are… they help me think about what somebody else’s inner life is like. Like that. I find fiction reliable.” (John Plotz, 26:53)

• On music and writing:

  “There’s something about shaping a sentence too, which can be musical… punctuation is important to me in that regard.” (Helen Garner, 46:50)

• Favorite treat while writing:

  “I go and have a facial… somebody’s doing nice things to me in a physical way and… now I’m clean and I can go home.” (Helen Garner, 48:46)

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Important Timestamps

• 03:06: Garner introduces her background and process
• 05:31: Garner reads from The Children’s Bach
• 08:36: On assembling stories from scraps and not remembering writing some books
• 13:00: The jazz musician analogy on inspiration
• 16:08: On homes, childhood, and the legacy of her father’s restlessness
• 22:38: Share houses, feminism, and the gap between theory and practice
• 27:19: Reading fiction as entry into other minds
• 31:28: On Raymond Carver, Gordon Lish, and the power of editing
• 35:35: Story of "hacking out the adverbs" for cleaner prose
• 39:03: Diaries as practice and their evolution into source material
• 41:08: Differentiating between notebooks, diaries, and working journals
• 44:26: Importance of music as metaphor for order and meaning in writing
• 47:40: The endless subject of chaos and order in her books
• 48:46: Her favorite “treat” when writing gets difficult

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Tone & Language

The tone is intimate, candid, wryly humorous, and reflective. Garner oscillates between self-deprecation and hard-won confidence, often interrupting herself with humility or delight. Her conversational partners, McMahon and Plotz, are respectful, supportive, and deeply engaged with her work, encouraging expansion rather than confrontation.

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Takeaways

This episode is a rich resource for anyone interested in the creative process. Garner’s reflections illuminate how art emerges out of observation, discipline, introspection, and—crucially—the willingness to leave space for the reader. Her lifelong wrestling with homes, diaries, and the music of sentences speaks to the way craft and life constantly intertwine.

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For Further Listening: The hosts mention previous Novel Dialogue crossovers, including episodes with Orhan Pamuk and the High Theory team, for additional context on the series' explorations of novel writing and criticism.

Transcript

[Helen Garner]

Hi, I'm elizabeth ferri. Welcome to another rebroadcast from the rtb archives.

[Recall This Book Host]

Hello and welcome to episode 54 of Recall this Book, the last episode in our exciting crossover month. If you missed crossover number one with the High Theory team and crossover number two with the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, give them a listen when you're done with this conversation with Drum roll please, the Australian great Helen Garner. So like our Pamuk parlay, this comes to us from the spanking new podcast Novel Dialogue. If you like what you hear, then navigate over to Novel Dialogue to subscribe on its website or in Stitcher, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. That's two words, Novel Dialogue. So as those with long memories, or at least two week long memories will recall, this podcast actually arose from a pandemic era set of zoom conversations between Arti Vade of Duke and this familiar voice.

[John Plotz]

Hello and welcome to Novel Dialogue, which is a podcast that brings novelists and critics together to explore the making of novels and and what to make of them. So how do novelists react when faced with the scholars who study and teach their work? Some of them, at least somehow managed to stifle the impulse to flee. And I think we're very lucky that this includes Helen Garner, who's noted for her nonfiction and fiction alike and is the author of a lapidary masterpiece that I've read over and over, the children's Bach. Ms. Garner, hello and welcome.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

Thank you.

[Helen Garner]

Thank you for inviting me.

[John Plotz]

Thank you so much for coming on. So I'm John Plotz, and you're going to be hearing from my partner Arthi Vade in upcoming episodes, but today I'm going to be serving as third wheel for a conversation between Helen Garner and Professor Elizabeth McMahon, a distinguished scholar of Australian literature at the University of New South Wales and the author of, among much fine other work, the 2016 monograph Identity and the Literary Imagination. So Helen Garner's novels include her prize winning 2018 the Spare Room, but she's been celebrated as a novelist since her 1977 monkey grip, which is, among other things, a remarkable anatomy of addiction and an unsparing yet still sympathetic portrayal of the share house life of 1970s Melbourne. She's also the author of so Helen. I lost count at about a dozen, but I will say at least a dozen books of nonfiction, including the First Stone and this House of Grief, as well as three screenplays among them for Gillian Armstrong's very wonderful and I think, very Garneresque film the Last Days of Shez New So it's an honor to have you both here and I hand the conversation over to you.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

Thanks, John. Because one of the ways that. One of the things you've spoken about quite a bit in your conversations about your writing and what is so incredibly

[Helen Garner]

clear

[Elizabeth McMahon]

in your writing is this despair

[Helen Garner]

economy

[Elizabeth McMahon]

in which scene and mood are set and you've talked about a number of times where you were writing and then you went to cut back and cut back, cut back the work to get rid of parts of description and

[Helen Garner]

to be left with.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

I think you used the word gaps to create the gaps in the writing

[Helen Garner]

as well as what's actually there.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

And I'd like to think about that a bit. And I think that one of the ways that we could go into that is to. If you wouldn't mind reading the section from the Children's park, because I think that it is, you know, the whole book does this, and it's one of the extraordinary experiences of reading it is

[Helen Garner]

that as a reader you feel completely

[Elizabeth McMahon]

located, but also like you're just missing something or just behind or just in front of something all the time. So could you read that section for us?

[Helen Garner]

Sure. This comes about not quite halfway through, about a third of the way into the book. Vicki began to hang round the Fox's house in Bunker Street. Earlier each day. They heard her old pushbike crash against the rubbish bins at breakfast time. She sprang up the concrete steps, checked her hair in the glass and stayed an hour, ate an egg that Dexter had poached for himself, tried to make herself useful and agreeable. And though she was domestically incompetent, she tipped tea leaves down the sink and blocked it. She put embers from the potbelly stove into a plastic bucket and melted it. But she began to know where things were. She was cheerful company. She laughed at Dexter's jokes. She played with Arthur, she laced his boots for him, though he'd been able to do it himself for years. Can I walk down to school with you? She said. Do you mind? Yes, said Arthur with his nose in a cereal packet. You do mind. I mean, yes, you can come. When the mail arrived and Athena opened envelopes, Vicki watched and said, I never get any letters. Athena suppressed an impulse to say, you can read mine. Vicki loved their lavatory in the corner of the yard, its shelves made of brick and timber, stuffed with old paperbacks, broken tools, camping gear and boxes of worn down pencils. She loved the notes they left for each other, the drawings and silly rhymes, the embarrassing singing, the vegetable garden, the fluster under which lay a generous order, the rushes of activity followed by periods of sunny calm. Vicki was in love with the house, with the family, with the whole establishment of it. Bunker street is her God, said Elizabeth. Dexter was flattered. I feel sentimental when I see you, Morty, he said. Why don't you bring this Philip around here? Philip? What would I bring him here for? He's your bloke, isn't he? Aren't you going to get married one of these days? Elizabeth shouted with laughter. Marry him? Forget it. He's already married. And anyway, can you see me as a married woman? Dexter clenched his fists and danced up and down on the spot. But I want you to be happily married. Elizabeth raised her eyes to the ceiling. I don't understand the way you live, said Dexter. What are the rules? Does he, you know, betray you? Of course he bloody betrays me, said Elizabeth. When you've been with someone that long, what else is there to do? Dexter flung out his arms and turned to Vicki, who was at the mirror by the piano, trying to tie a scarf around her head. I hate modern life, he said. Modern American manners. It's just love, said Vicki, turning and twisting to get a back view of herself. Love roared Dexter. I've never been in love. Then in love? I don't even know what it is. What's so funny? You'll find out one day.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

What is this process of creating that and peering back in your writing?

[Helen Garner]

Let's see. Well, this book, I think particularly, I have great fondness for this book, but I think it's probably the best thing that I ever wrote. And sometimes I look at it and I don't remember writing it. It's as if someone else, some other person called Helen Garner, wrote this book. I feel that. Anyway, I won't go there, but I do feel that I do like it. So if other people like it, I'm really delighted. But I think one thing I'm really good at, and I think it might be something to do with my lifelong habit of keeping a diary and a notebook, is I'm really good at keeping scraps of things and figuring out ways to fix them together. Just details. Things that I write down and hear and notice in the life around me, things that I write down without any purpose, they just catch my attention and I scribble them down somewhere. And then one day I start thinking about a story. Maybe I could write a story about some people like this. And so I write one sentence and then I write another. And at a certain point, all these things that in A sense that I've noted and which is still floating around in my head. I can see a place where I can use them. I can see how I can attach them to each other. Or, for example, in here, there's a scene where Athena goes wandering around the city at night. And she's. She goes into a cafe and there are some Italian men in there. And the TV's on up high, and she sees a skier go down at tremendous speed, a snowy mountainside. And I remember. I'm just getting a shiver remembering it. I mean, I scribbled that down at the time from some cafe I was in. And then years later, I've got this character wandering into a cafe and think, yes, here's where I can put in the skier. And the skier seems to have a meaning that it didn't have before and some sort of significance. That's what's the word. Bestowed on it by this other structure that I'm building. I don't know if that makes any sense, but.

[John Plotz]

Helen, can I jump? Can I jump in on that? I love that image of the keeping of the pieces. And then the meaning gets bestowed when you figure out how they fit together. Does that. There's this, you know, I'm obsessed with Hannah Arendt. And when she says that you always have to be scared of artists because they're always looking to turn something into an artwork, in other words. So she says, that's the real reification. It's like, you know, because when you're around them, they're always seeing how the thing fits into the meaning of art. Does that resonate for you? Because in a way, what you're describing, it almost seems like you experience it first and then it becomes an artwork afterwards.

[Helen Garner]

Oh, yes. Yeah. That seems much more. What Hannah Arendt said, seems much more kind of conscious than my experience is. So it's funny you should mention that, though, because now that I've started publishing my diaries from way back, I'm a bit worried when I'm in a room with people that they're thinking, I bet she's going to write all this down. I bet she's going to write down everything I say. And because of the COVID lockdowns, of course, I haven't been with anyone for about a year, so I've forgotten that feeling. But last night I went to dinner with three women. And we were laughing and talking. And it wouldn't have occurred to me to write anything down or to be thinking, oh, I must turn that into something, or that it is something. And I just have to get home and write it down. But so. But I always had this urge to say, listen, okay, do you want to make a deal? I want. Before we start talking, do you want me to promise not to? And I think that would be stupid. That would really hamstring me. So. I've never said that to anyone. In fact, this is the first time I've actually confessed it to another human being.

[John Plotz]

Helen, you also said something about how when you look back at children's Bach, it doesn't seem like it's like another Helen Garner who wrote that. Is that specific to children's Bach, or is that how you think about your.

[Helen Garner]

Yeah. No. Specific to children's Bach or. It's as if when I look at other old stuff, you know, from the past, I can see. I can still feel myself doing it. But when I look at this, some detachment seems to have occurred between me and the story. I can't even articulate this feeling, but I just think, gosh, I don't even remember thinking that, let alone saying it. And that's a very exciting and wonderful feeling for me, you know, And I've often quoted this, but I'll quote it again. I once read an interview with a jazz saxophone player in the New Yorker many, many years ago, and he said, when I play badly, it's my fault. When I play well, it's got nothing to do with me. And I was blown away by that. I hadn't actually experienced it yet, but I thought, oh, God, how wonderful. There must be a sort of a state that you arrive at. And I look back and I think it's a kind of blessed state. And I think it only lasts for a very short time. But then. So I was very surprised once when I was groaning and moaning about something else. I was trying to write, and I was lying down, you know, like this in front of my desk. Well, not beside my desk. And there were some notebooks shoved into a shelf near me. And I just thought, I wonder what that is? And I pulled it out, and what was a diary. And it was a diary that I'd kept and during the writing of the children's Bach. And it was full of the same old torture, you know, I was saying, I can't do this. I can't make it right. How am I going to get Dexter out of the house and torturing myself so plainly? I wasn't in any sort of blessed state. You know, I was just slogging away at the coal face in the usual way. So it's a Great mystery for me, that book. Anyway, I'm so glad that you like it, too.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

Oh, yeah. And we're not alone in that, I think. You know, it's such an extraordinary book. One of the reasons I asked you to read that scene too, Helen, was that it focuses on somebody from outside looking at the home that somebody else has made and also an interloper coming in who's going to disrupt that. People who are going to disrupt that home as well. And so this idea of homes in your work, in the shared house, of course, in Monkey Grip, and of course the spare room. But so many ways that the home is so important. And I was struck when I read an interview with you and you spoke about your father who said he had no attachment to any home at all. Or any house at all, Nothing. And what that meant for you. And can I ask about what the house. Houses have meant for you in literal terms in the first instance, the homes you've lived in?

[Helen Garner]

Well, firstly, I say about my father that he was a very restless person and he was always dragging my mother from house to house. So. And yet I think I only lived in, let's say, 1, 2, 3, 4 houses in my childhood. It's not as if we moved every six months, but I sat down recently and made a list of all the houses I'd lived in, all the places I'd lived, and it came to 27. And does that seem a lot to you?

[John Plotz]

Yeah, I think so.

[Helen Garner]

Close your eyes. Exhale. Feel your body relax and let go of whatever you're carrying today. Well, I'm letting go of the worry that I wouldn't get my new contacts in time for this class. I got them delivered free from 1-800-contacts. Oh, my gosh, they're so fast. And breathe.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

Oh, sorry.

[Helen Garner]

I almost couldn't breathe when I saw

[Elizabeth McMahon]

the discount they gave me on my first order.

[Helen Garner]

Oh, sorry. Namaste. Visit 1-800-contacts.com today to save on your first order. 1-800-contacts.

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[Helen Garner]

I was quite shocked, and some of them might only stayed for maybe six months, but I just wrote down every single one, every single address, and it gave me quite a shock.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

I'm just calculating mine. Is that what you want to do

[Helen Garner]

at the ceiling?

[John Plotz]

I've got about. I think I'm about 10. Between 10 and 13, but that's about me as well. Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

Well, there you go. It's not as if we're sort of rooted in place. Right.

[John Plotz]

Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

Any of us. But. Yeah. Well, the thing that my father said, you know, he said. He sort of roundly declared that he never had any sentimental attachment to any blah, blah, blah. I just looked at him and I thought, that really is a weird thing to say. I mean, he said it sort of proudly, as if because I was helping him move him and my mother move to a different house. But he's the sort of guy who used to go for a walk, see a house that was being auctioned at that very moment. He'd walk up to the auction and bid on it and buy it a house and go home and say, okay, Mum, we're moving to Kew. And Mum would be really upset and furious because she liked where they were and he dragged her around the world in that way. But I do find that sort of highly, sort of neurotic and just kind of boredom and itchy feet. So it meant that my mother, of course, was perpetually being detached from her neighbours, groups of friends. And so she ended up depressed and very lonely, and then she got Alzheimer's and then she died. And I can't help seeing it as a sort of. You can see the trail there. It was very painful to witness, actually. But, see, now, I've been living in the same house for, what, nearly 20 years, and that's the longest I've been anywhere. And I love it. I mean, you can grow things and you can see them as a tree and it has plums on it, you know? Yeah.

[John Plotz]

You can watch a tree grow. I think that's amazing. Yeah. I find that so satisfying. Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

Yeah.

[John Plotz]

This is a shot in the dark, Helen, but are you a fan of Marilyn Robinson at all, who wrote Housekeeping?

[Helen Garner]

Oh, very much, yes. I greatly admire her. She's wonderful.

[John Plotz]

Do you have. Do you have a thought about. Because I feel like she's really obsessed with Holmes in a really interesting way as well, that there are the people who leave and the people who stay, you know, that housekeeping is sort of structured around the wandering aunt and then, you know, the sister who really wants to just stay in Fingerbone or whatever it's called. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's like the permanent. I think of it as a very American dynamic, but maybe it's Australian too. Like that.

[Helen Garner]

Yes.

[John Plotz]

Mixed people and the wandering people, you know.

[Helen Garner]

Yes. I haven't quite actually. Housekeeping. So I did read that when it first came out. I've never read it again, but I've read Gilead and the whole little group,

[Elizabeth McMahon]

which is Gilead's astonishing.

[Helen Garner]

But yeah. Yes. I never used to understand people who stayed in the same place. I used to think, don't you bored? What? In terms of what I move, not to move country or to move city, but just to move house. And still I find if I'm walking around, even in my neighborhood, I'm always thinking, could I live in that house? That one's a style. I'll go and look at it. And I just love that. One thing I absolutely adore is the smell of fresh paint. It always reminds me of when you move into some shit house that we've rented as a group and you think, oh, yeah, we can make this nice. And so everyone gets up on a ladder and paint. And you're eating a sandwich while you're painting. And oh, those were happy times back in the 70s, when you could move into a house in a week and make it nice. Just white paint up everywhere, a bit of calico. And then you had a new space. And there are those dreams. I know this is in my work somewhere. Those dreams where you go into a house that you felt. That felt familiar. But then in the dream you discover a whole other wing.

[John Plotz]

Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

Oh, I didn't know that was there. Or often it's an attic. You go up some stairs and think, there's a beautiful room up here and it's got a view and I can look out. And those are very thrilling. It's very strange, really. I'm raving on it, so stop me. But this is sort of linked to the theme. Someone I was married to once said that he thought that I should stop writing about households. He said, why do you keep writing about households? And I thought, oh, firstly, I hadn't noticed that I was writing about households because I wasn't doing it on purpose. And secondly, I thought, but why wouldn't I write about them? Because they're just so endlessly interesting.

[John Plotz]

Can I ask you about another? Just about then you also say you're describing. I think it's Janet, the house owner there. She says, some of us fell into the gap between theory and practice. Can you say more about that? That's such a wonderful. You're talking about people who died, people who couldn't live that life, or people

[Helen Garner]

in the share house, junkies or.

[John Plotz]

Yeah, right.

[Helen Garner]

Yeah, well, I'm. Yes, well, theory. In the 70s, we had a lot of theory. We had. Well, the feminism was the main one. But, you know, everybody I ever shared a house with was some sort of lefty. And, you know, we were always going out on demonstrations and making flags and banners and stuff. And. We had high hopes. We thought that feminism was going to change the world. And, you know, in a lot of ways it probably did. But there's a hell of a lot of stuff that I think will never change, doesn't matter what politics arise. But we hoped for. We hoped that we could make this gets back to what we were talking about before, about the dynamic of people, social dynamic in a share house. We hoped, we sort of believed it was possible to make a household that wouldn't have the kind of rigid roles that our parents and our childhood had, which were, you know, everybody kind of crept around when the father was home, you know, that sort of dynamic. And we hoped very much that the raising of children would be shared with men. But in those households there would be single mothers, women who needed a household that needed the village to help them raise the child. And it is true that for many years I still feel deep gratitude for people I shared houses with, and in a sense, especially the men, because some of them were quite young and they didn't have children of their own. But they were so good to the children, they were wonderful with our kids. And I look back on those times with great fondness and tenderness. But often their households would explode for some reason, or someone would sleep with someone's boyfriend, or somebody would be envious because they didn't have a job and everyone else did and just things that the other thing we didn't have. We didn't have any psychological theory. We were ignorant of psychology and scornful of it. We thought that people. We didn't even know there was such a thing as therapy. We didn't know you could go and ask someone for help if you were freaking out and your life was a mess. So we didn't have any concepts with which to examine the dynamic of our household.

[John Plotz]

So it's interesting because it's the gap between theory and practice. But you're saying you were missing some of the theory, like there was other types of theory.

[Helen Garner]

We had plenty of theory about large Social movements, but not much about inner struggles. I think Australia.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

I mean, here's a generalization, Helen, but I think Australia is still a sort of psychologically ignorant country, I think, or a culture, I think more. There's been some headway, but I don't know if that's broader statement. True, but it strikes me that we are, that.

[Helen Garner]

Yes, that's true. It certainly hasn't. Well, psychoanalytic thinking certainly hasn't sunk deep into the texture of things here. It hasn't. And there's still a lot of hostility to it, to that kind of thinking

[Elizabeth McMahon]

and to the assistance it could bring. The clarity of my doctor can.

[Helen Garner]

Yeah, sorry. People. It seems to me that people who despise psychotherapy, like, we're all going along in a ship, right? And some people fall overboard. And the psychotherapy, to me is like, you know, they're sort of the round thing that you throw in that floats. What's it called? The life belt. And there are other people on the ship who go, huh, there's nothing the matter. You know, you're just a wimp. If you can't swim out, why throw the. And I find that just so sort of terrible and brutal and sad, really.

[John Plotz]

But is it. Is it crazy to say that the novel. That novels are a kind of psychological theory also? I mean, I've always thought that, like, when you were describing the dream, the dream of the extra attic, I was thinking, well, that's Jane Eyre, right? Like, that's what that. Is that unsatisfying. I mean, to me, like, novels are dreaming. They help me think about what somebody else's inner life is like. Like that. I find fiction reliable.

[Helen Garner]

That's one of the great wonders, isn't it? Just that you can enter another person's psyche and the writer's psyche, but the psyches of the characters are so endlessly fascinating. So I sort of. I find, though, that there are times when I really can't sort of bear to read a novel. It surprised me during the. We had very ferocious lockdowns for the pandemic in Victoria, and I was really quite shocked to find that reading was difficult for me because that's my default thing. And when the chips are down, that's what I do. But I. Somehow, something happened that made it that I couldn't do it, or I couldn't concentrate, or I couldn't use. Use what was available to help me.

[John Plotz]

What did you do instead?

[Helen Garner]

Oh, I don't know. I just lay round. Lay on the bed, looking at the ceiling. Oh, in the first Lockdown. I worked quite hard on the second volume of the diary. So that was. That was actually work, and I was quite hard.

[John Plotz]

That's good. Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

The second one, I. I watched a bit of tv. I watched. I started watching West Wing, which I never watched the first time around, but I guess I was sad.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

Helen, who would you say would be writers that formed your. Or informed your own, or you liked or informed your own practice of writing,

[Helen Garner]

or informed your own fictional worlds or non fictional worlds? Can you name any of them? This is always a very difficult question for me. As soon as someone asks me this question, I go blank and I. It's really weird because I've done nothing but read most of my life, and starting from when I was. And I don't really know how to answer that question. Somewhere in. Somewhere in this diary I'm working on at the moment, the third volume of the diaries, I came across a remark that I'd made to the effect that I thought I was comparing the sort of rather dry, restrained English influence that I've had from a lot of British reading with the sort of noisier,

[John Plotz]

more

[Helen Garner]

rambunctious kind of American influence that I've got. And I remarked something to the effect of. I think that, you know, whatever small thing it is I've got, it's a combination of those two things. And I, you know, I'd love to say, oh, well, Chekhov is my greatest influence, but, you know, I've read Chekhov. I love Chekhov and I love Tolstoy, but. And I love. Certain. I'm a huge fan, for example, of Philip Roth, but Philip Roth, when you pick up a book by Philip Roth and there's such power in the books that it's kind of awestriking. It's not something you can use as a model. Oh, I know who I've used as a model. Raymond Carver. Raymond Carver had a huge influence on me. And I. Yeah, when I read his stories first, I was just thunderstruck. I thought, what you can do with so little. And it's packed. The page is packed and you look at it and it's all white. Yeah. I think he was a wonderful, fabulous writer. And I do know that a lot of it was the influence of Gordon Lish. He's ferocious editor. But I reckon Gordon Lish, I know nothing else about him, except I once read a short story he wrote, and it was terrible. It was a really awful story. It was kind of bullshit, and it was really kind of, you know, sort of packed with testosterone, like gestures And I thought, God. But as an editor, he had this amazing light touch. And wasn't it interesting? After he. After Carver died and Tess Gallagher republished some of the. She published some of the early drafts, the pre. Lisch drafts of a couple of his stories. And I went to read them, and I was horrified. I thought, firstly, the stories, they become mushy and sentimental. And I thought that's what Lisch got rid of out of it. He got rid of that sort of mush of the drunk. The drunk sentimentality. He just stripped that right out. And I did puzzle. I wondered why Tess Gallagher had done this. And I thought that perhaps she thought it was an act of loyalty or love, perhaps. And then I wondered. I mean, this is no real sort of sneaky psychoanalytic thought. I thought maybe it was actually an act of rivalry.

[John Plotz]

Yes.

[Helen Garner]

And, I mean, I don't know her, and I'm sure that if I met her, I would like her and we would get on judging by her own work. But I was really struck by her having reversed that process. And I wonder if anybody's written anything about that.

[John Plotz]

Helen, do you know this essay that Willa Cather wrote, sort of mid. Mid, late career, she wrote an essay called the novel De Moble, meaning the novel stripped of furniture and just saying that.

[Helen Garner]

Oh, no.

[John Plotz]

Yes. So it's a house metaphor, I guess. Right. In fact, she talks about the upper room, the Jesus. Yeah, but she talks about the notion of getting read as the aesthetic practice of the novel. That it's. That what you want to do is create the space and then withdraw from it, you know, so that what the reader hears is not the words, but the overtones. Like not the said word, but the unsaid word. It's almost like describing images, poetry almost, you know,

[Helen Garner]

that links up with all the stuff that Hemingway says in. What is it called? The Movable Feast. You know, that rather sort of strange little memoir that he wrote.

[John Plotz]

Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

He says, what you. What you cut. You cut and cut. But the reader still feels the presence.

[John Plotz]

Right.

[Helen Garner]

Of what you cut. And I'm sure that's. That's true. And that. That gets back to what you were saying before, Liz, about. About cutting. And the thing about cutting is. Oh, yeah. I could tell a little story. Back in the 80s, I met that. This German guy who used to teach creative writing. I forget where, at some university, perhaps in California. His name is Reinhard Letter. And he read something of mine, and he said, there's too many adverbs in that. And it was the first time anyone had Pointed out to me their sort of heavy handedness adverbs. And that was probably the most useful thing anyone's ever said to me as a critique. And not long after that, the book in question, which was Honour and Other People's Children, my second book, which is a bit of a mess, that was going to be reissued. And so I thought, hey, I'm going to hack out the adverbs. And I said to my husband at the time, the writer, I said, I'm going to hack the adverbs out of this. And he said, you can't do that. He said, that will be tampering with history. I said, I don't care, I'm hacking them. So I hacked away and pretty soon I was like ankle deep in adverbs. And I felt so overjoyed by that. And they were really quite sort of, you know, they weren't me writing at my best, those two stories. But I did feel very liberated by that comment. And I realized once again how little you can manage with and how there's. I find this again and again that that sort of fat writing that I don't want to have. The fatness seems to issue from my anxiety and inability to trust the reader, the inability to believe that the reader's gonna go there or is with me and has brought all stuff from her own or his own experience that will furnish that room so I don't have to furnish it. Bringing in the Demubli concept.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

Can I ask about the diaries?

[Helen Garner]

I've been.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

These are the most recent books of yours that I've been reading in the last few days as well. And I'm not a diary writer.

[Helen Garner]

I've read lots of other people's diaries.

[Elizabeth McMahon]

But yours were, as you say, these observations captured. And you write of yourself or other people in the third person. The first person is all the literary world is there. I was really fascinated by that.

[Helen Garner]

When I burnt my diaries. I burnt all my diaries up to the point at which Yellow Notebook Starts. And the reason why I burnt them was because they were just so boring. I found them boring and whingy and a bit like the kind of thing that Peter Corras had been criticising, I suppose, you know, a lot of romance and, you know, why doesn't he love me? And that sort of stuff. But so I burnt it all. And also it was because I had looked in there to find out what I'd written on the day of the Whitlam dismissal, the dismissal of an elected labor government. And I thought, I wonder what I wrote about it. And I looked in the diary, and I hadn't even mentioned it. So I thought, oh, my God, Okay, I just made a fire and I threw the whole lot on. But the point at which I sort of stopped burning was where they started to get more interesting. And I thought. And they started to be not so much about my private thoughts and experiences as just observation of the world around me and observation of people I met or things that I ever heard, things like that. And then as I went on, I could see. I mean, I. Just editing the diary for publication was quite painful process and humiliating in many ways. But I could see that what this was and what it amounted to was my 10,000 hours. How you get to be any good at something. You practice, and you practice every single day. And you don't do it with grinding purpose, necessarily. You do it because maybe you really love playing tennis. And it's the thing you love the most. And the thing I love the most is messing around with a pen on a bit of paper. I mean, that was from when I was a girl. That's the thing I love the most. And so. And what do you write about? You write about the day you sit down before you go to bed at night, and you sort of. You use the diary to calm yourself for sleep or to just say, okay, what happened today? What did I learn today? What did anyone say to me? Or what's in my mind? What's the. You know, what Freud calls the day's residue? And I. And when I was writing, I wasn't just crudely taking notes. I was actually trying to write coherently and to make good sentences, shapely ones, and to use, you know, it was. And I enjoyed it. It was a pleasure. That was the one part of my day that I knew I was going to enjoy, was writing him a diary. And that's the same even now and then, when I started to want to. I mean, for example, when I started writing the Children's Bachelor, I found all sorts of things in the diary that I could use that were chunks of material that I could, as it were, develop or grow. This is where it all starts. My explanation gets a bit blurry because I really don't understand this process. I just know that every now and then I write something in the diary that seems to transcend at the immediate moment, and it's got kind of potential usefulness.

[John Plotz]

So, Helen, at the beginning of a conversation, you were talking about these scraps that came back to you for later use. Are those. Would those generally be from the Diary, or are they something else, like. Like. Did you have a different way of writing?

[Helen Garner]

I do have a little notebook, you know, just a notebook that I keep in my bag, which I noticed that I hardly use at all now. I don't seem to fill them up as I used to. And they were very useful for. I mean, you know, when you're on a bus or a tram and somebody next to you talking. And it's not often it's not the content of what they say, but just the way they're shaping their sentences or the music of it, which is thrilling. And so I would tend to write those things down, and then I could use them later or I could adapt them. But perhaps the notebook's more like just hearing the tune of everything that's around you.

[John Plotz]

Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

A diary is more analytical and trying to understand what hurt you or what made you laugh or. Yeah, it's just a sort of practice call, I suppose.

[John Plotz]

George Eliot had these books. I've actually held one in my hand called Quarry, like the quarry from Middlemarch. But I think it's different because she kept it when she already knew she was going to write a novel that maybe was going to be called Dorothea Brooke, or maybe it was going to be called Middlemarch, but it was a quarry for the novel. But that's not what you're describing, right? I mean, it's not. Because it's.

[Helen Garner]

I've used that. I could. In nonfiction, I would use that. Those books that you mentioned, Liz Jo Tinque and this House of Grief. As soon as I start, as soon as I go to a trial, the first thing I do is go and buy myself a special notebook that's going to be about my experience in the court. And so that I have these kind. I suppose they're kind of like working journals. They. They're different from. They're separate from the ordinary diary, but they. But I write. I use them a lot. And they would be. Each day I write an account of basically what was my engagement with the material, I suppose you'd call it, and who said things to me and what I noticed about people in the court, or what maybe a lawyer said to me on the way out the door. Different from the stuff I would be putting in my little notebook when I was actually sitting there in the court. And what I found was, when I come to actually write the book, that those working journals are the spine of the book. And I didn't know that's what they were when I was writing them, or the first time I didn't because the second time I realized that that was how I was going to be able to use that stuff later.

[John Plotz]

Like, I love the way you talked about responsibility and also detachment in a couple of different senses. But one thing that hasn't come up yet that I was hoping to touch on is just. Is music, like, music as a metaphor for you? I mean, the children's Bach, obviously, but also just like, you know, once I started thinking about it, you see it everywhere. There's, you know, like in Cosmo, there's a little moment when Natalie says, I like a quartet. It's like a family or a conversation. And I just feel like it does seem like it's a persistent set of metaphors for you from, I don't know, making sense of the world, making sense of writing. So. Yeah, can you just talk about that a bit?

[Helen Garner]

Oh, yeah. Well, I never sort of consciously thought that, but, you know, I've. Music is very. I just love it. You know, once again, I go through periods where I don't really listen to it much. And that was something else that happened in the lockdown. I surprised myself, but I just sort of didn't want to listen to music. But I do know that I tried to learn the piano when I never learned as a child. When I was about 40, I decided trying to learn the piano, and I had a couple of teachers over the subsequent years, and I never got anywhere, but I sort of loved it. And I had the kind of teachers who could see that I had no particular challenge as a musician, but that music itself was. I remember saying to one of my teachers, she says, oh, I think you should learn the second tourney piece because you can handle that first one. I said, oh, great. I said, I love boring exercises. I spontaneously said. And she said, oh, yes, that doesn't surprise me because it means that you've got a certain kind of relationship with the music. You see, you see things in the music that other people don't. She actually said that. I was so happy. But it's true that, you know, that's why I love Bach so much, because of the formal. I mean, just the. The person who put me onto JS Buck was Manning Clark, actually, the historian. And he used to say to me, my maiden name was Ford. He used to call me Ms. Ford. He said, Ms. Ford, come and listen to this. And he just put on this glorious thing. And he never said anything. He didn't expect me to say anything. He just said, listen to this. And so, I don't know, I started to listen To Bach, and Bach, his Bach's keyboard music particularly, is, to me, the absolute peak of civilization. And it's. You just listen to that music and even. Or try to play it. And even if you can't play, you just stagger through some little piece, it still makes you feel that there is such a thing as meaning or that everything isn't chaos. And just the way that he resolves the piece, so calming and beautiful. So I thought that. There's something about shaping a sentence, too, which can be musical. I mean, there's a. I've got a fairly strong sense of when a sentence isn't working and how if you shift the load of it to a different place, you get a balance or you get a forward surge and punctuation is important to me in that regard.

[John Plotz]

What you love writing about, like in, say, Monkey Grip or Children's Bach, is very unordered spaces. Like, you're writing about a disorderly world in this orderly way, and that feels like a tension. Right. Or do you not.

[Helen Garner]

Yes.

[John Plotz]

Yeah.

[Helen Garner]

Yes. Or an attempt not to be swept away in chaos or to find a sort of place to stand in chaos. Well, I find chaos actually quite frightening. And I have an urge to impose order, I think. I mean, I'm actually quite known to be a rather bossy person, and I think that's what that is. I really admire people, a person who can walk into a room, and when they walk in and everyone's fighting or yelling, and if they walk in, something

[John Plotz]

happens, we always ask this one question, and it's a somewhat goofy question, so you could take it in any way you want, but the question is, basically, what's your favorite treat while you're in the throes of writing? And it doesn't have to be food. I mean, is there something that you do or you play or you drink or you eat when the going gets really tough for you?

[Helen Garner]

Well, that's very interesting. Let me think. This comes to mind. I go and have a facial.

[John Plotz]

Oh, wow, great.

[Helen Garner]

Yeah. I only do that. That's the first thing that came to mind once. I would have said I go and get a massage, but I suppose it's looking for, once again, a quiet thing where nobody's talking and somebody's doing nice things to me in a physical way. And. Yeah, I don't know. I've never thought that before. Maybe that's bullshit, but it was the first thing that came to mind. So, psychoanalytically, how long does it.

[John Plotz]

I don't know. How long does a facial last?

[Helen Garner]

About an hour. About an hour, yeah. And basically they're cleaning your face, you know, they're taking out of your pores all the crap that's blown in there off the street and you haven't managed to wash out by yourself. So I suppose it's a, it's one of those blessing type feelings, you know, where you think, now I'm clean and I can go home.

[Recall This Book Host]

So here I am again. As you recall this book Host to thank both Helen Garner and Arthi Vade and the Novel dialogue team that's noveldialogue.org for that crossover episode, I will also quickly add that Recall this book is sponsored by Brandeis University and the Mandel center for the Humanities. Music comes from Eric Chaslow and Barbara Cassidy, sound editing by Claire Ogden, Website design and social media media by Nye Kim. So from all of us at Novel Dialogue and recall this book. Thanks for listening.

[Helen Garner]

Foreign.

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