Books
Helen Garner
Everywhere I Look
Collected nonfiction makes for a strange kind of book with a high risk of filler and miscellany. The enjoyment of even very good essays can be qualified and provisional, so peculiar are the circumstances under which most magazine assignments are written.
But why pretend for a minute that we aren’t talking about Helen Garner? This collection of 33 essays is indeed a miscellany; as if to foreground this, it begins with one about learning to play the ukulele. The next is about buying a table.
But what an essay about the ukulele! And what an essay about a table! Perhaps it’s that everything in a Garner essay is an opportunity for self-scrutiny (she buys the table as a means to avoid one possible fate of a woman living alone, “standing at the open fridge door and dining on a cold boiled potato. I was determined to be elegant in my solitude.”). Perhaps it’s her ability to say complex things simply, even as she makes clear that nothing is simple.
Her essay on the insults of ageing, published in The Monthly last year, is as terrific as you remember it: “Really, it is astonishing how much shit a woman will cop in the interests of civic and domestic order.” Its themes (grace, insults, bodies, ageing) are echoed in an upsetting remembrance of Elizabeth Jolley. There are very rich profiles of everyone from Rosie Batty to Russell Crowe.
For a few long stretches the published work is broken by extracts from the author’s diaries. Even this is not filler. It’s often a record of the quietly uncanny. When Garner visits a fashionable cafe as the world economy goes into freefall, she sees five men in shirts and ties whom she first thinks are having a business meeting. “Then I realise they are praying.” Writers fall in love with Garner, I think, because her topic is often, in some way, writing; even when it isn’t, she is always offering a model for working and thinking. In parts of the diary, you see that her plans for triumphs of routine and productivity are as wild as anyone’s; they are just as quickly arrived at and just as easily thwarted.
In one entry, she quotes Joan Acocella, the great critic, on finding “a point … where aesthetics meets morals”. It’s not a bad description of the place Garner writes from, and of course, she’d be the first to cite it. CR
Text, 240pp, $29.99
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on March 26, 2016 as "Helen Garner, Everywhere I Look".
For almost a decade, The Saturday Paper has published Australia’s leading writers and thinkers. We have pursued stories that are ignored elsewhere, covering them with sensitivity and depth. We have done this on refugee policy, on government integrity, on robo-debt, on aged care, on climate change, on the pandemic.
All our journalism is fiercely independent. It relies on the support of readers. By subscribing to The Saturday Paper, you are ensuring that we can continue to produce essential, issue-defining coverage, to dig out stories that take time, to doggedly hold to account politicians and the political class.
There are very few titles that have the freedom and the space to produce journalism like this. In a country with a concentration of media ownership unlike anything else in the world, it is vitally important. Your subscription helps make it possible.
Select your digital subscription
Get the news you need
to your inbox.
