Conversations with women (over 40): author Helen Garner, 81
"I don’t give a shit about the erotic gaze. What I'm interested in is the human contact gaze."
If ever anyone personified who I want to be when (if!) I grow up, it’s Australian novelist, Helen Garner. Here’s the conversation she and I had for The Shift podcast a couple of weeks ago. (Helen is based in Melbourne, and I’m in Scotland, so it was earlyish morning with her and mid-evening for me.)
About Helen: widely considered one of Australia’s greatest living novelists, it’s only now, at the age of 81, that she’s finally seeing almost all of her books published in the UK and United States. (In the UK, Wiedenfeld & Nicolson bought ten (ten!) last year.) Born in 1942 in Geelong, Victoria, the eldest of six, Helen has lived a fascinating life and one that has found its way into her 13 books. Her debut Monkey Grip, published in 1977 when she was a single mother, is still in print today; her second novel, The Children’s Bach (which is where I recommend you start if you’ve never read her), has been compared with Hemingway and Fitzgerald; and, her true crime classic, This House of Grief, has been declared one of the best books of the 21st century. Not bad for a regular kid from, as she puts it, “an ordinary Australian home - not many books and not much talk.”
Sam: Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. I hope you didn't have to get up too early?
Helen: No, I always wake up early. You know, when you get old, you don't sleep very well. This is a very annoying fact. I go to bed about 10.30 and wake up about 4.30. You see, I've got chickens – chooks – in the backyard. First thing I have to do every morning is go out there and let them out and give them something to eat. I sometimes wonder if I didn't have chickens, I might sleep longer, but it’s too late now.
Is that what wakes you up? Can you hear them?
No, I think I'm woken up by a sense of duty of having to keep some creature alive.
Have you always been woken up by a sense of duty?
I think I just naturally wake up early. I'm one of those annoying people who can't sleep in. Even in the days where I used to go out drinking and dancing, I still couldn't sleep in. But then, I think, once you have a kid, you've got to be alert. And now I've got grandchildren… but they're enormous teenagers, so I can't blame them for anything.
Although maybe waking you up when they come in?
Yeah. Yes, that would be a nuisance.
Do you live with them? Next door? How does it work? You're very close to them aren’t you?
Well, I'm actually next door. 20 years ago, maybe 23 years ago, [my daughter and her husband] bought this house that they live in now. And they needed to do some work on it before they could move in. At that stage, I lived in another suburb about half an hour's drive away, just me in a big empty house. And they said, “Can we come stay with you for six months while we fix up our new house?” And they had a little baby and everything so I thought, hurrah! this is going to be great. And it was. So they moved in. But naturally it took more like two years for them to do the work on the house. And in all that time we never quarrelled, we never fell out, nothing ever went wrong. We had a wonderful time. The baby was attached to me. When they finally moved to this house, she was furious with me, as if I'd left. She wouldn't speak to me for a week.
“It’s funny when you get to this age, people just die. People just turn around and disappear. It's quite shocking.”
My dad had moved into a little house that was for sale next door to my other house over in the other suburb. He lived there next door to me for about two years and then he died. But on the very day he died, my daughter’s next door neighbour put her head over the fence and said, “I’m gonna sell my house” and they ran to the phone and called me up and said, “Quick, quick, come on, come and see this house. And if you like it, you can sell the other one, buy this one. So we had the two houses side by side and they’re quite close together, so we just made a hole in the wall and put a little hallway across. So, in effect, it's one big house. But there is a sense of privacy.
So you can still shut the door on them, at least?
Yeah I can shut the door. Or I can lock the door if I want to.
Did you say your dad moved in next door to you?
He did, years ago, in the other house. That's 20 years ago. Yeah. Yeah, he did. But I never got on well with my father. And when you don't get on with a parent, there's something triangular going on. I think people find sometimes that when one parent dies, you get on much better with the surviving one than you ever have before. And that's what happened with me and dad. He was a kind of grouchy old bastard, and I’d had to fight him, you know? I was the oldest of the kids and I had to fight him for most of my life. But when mum died, he just sort of became a nicer person. We used to go out for coffee in the morning and we were always laughing, you know, it surprised me.
Do you think having been estranged from your dad, and then your mum dying, did that make you feel like, I need to make this right before he dies?
It greatly troubled me that I had this bad relationship with my father. And I used to try various ways of making it right, long before mum died. One time I said to him, “How about we go on a trip? Why don't we drive to what was then called Ayre’s Rock, Uluru, in the middle of the country. Why don't we drive up there? Just the two of us?” And he goes, “Oh, okay.” So we drove up there. But how do you straighten things out with, especially your father, a man of his generation, can't talk about anything, has no name for anything. Psychological thinking unknown! By the time we got to Uluru I was just about ready to get on a chopper and fly out, but they weren't available! I don’t know. But it was worth doing. He didn't even get out of the car when we got to the rock. He just sat there looking grumpily out the window.