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)

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.

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]

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)

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

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.

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.

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.