Hi there, It's Ruby Jones and I'm here to share a very special episode of Read This. Hosted by editor of the monthly Michael Williams, the show features conversations with some of the most talented writers from Australia and around the world. This week, we're going back to where it all started and sharing the inaugural episode of Read This, featuring Helen Garner. As always, Michael is here to tell
me a bit more about the episode him, Michael Ruby Jones. So, Michael, we're doing something a little different this week, and we're actually going to play the first ever episode I've Read This, which was recorded back in June of twenty twenty three,
and it's a really special episode. It features one of my all time favorite writers, Helen Garner, who at the time was in the early stages of writing her latest book this season, and the reason we're sharing this is because sadly, as many of our listeners would already know, Schwartz Media has decided to close their audio department, which means that Read This no longer has a home and well, we hope that the show continues again in the future.
It does seem like now is a good opportunity to reflect on the amazing guests and incredible conversations that you've had on the show and see just how far you've come.
Yeah. Thanks Ruby. This is a little nostalgia kind of
victory lap from the read This team. We're very sad to be finishing up our time at Schwartz Media and the show goes into hiatus now, but we thought that that was a good time to stop and take stock and think about some of the kind of great moments that we're very proud of in almost one hundred episodes, and so we've decided to go back to the first episode we got Helen Ghana and the best thing about it, I mean, it's wonderful to listen back to this interview.
For a range of reasons. Helen welcomed us into her home and we did the podcast episode from there, but she was also at the start of the project that would become the season. It was Helen at the point at which she'd found the writing bag again and she knew there was a book coming, and she was just teasy away at the threads that would eventually become a book that is now beloved, I'm sure by many of
our listeners. So it's so nice to listen to that moment when an abstract idea and a moment in her life was able to kind of make that shift to being a book, and that kind of encapsulates in a small way, what we've been lucky enough to do week in week out on Read This is talk to writers, not just on the publicity trail for the latest thing that they've got on the shelves, but talk to them in a moment of reflection or a moment of thoughtfulness.
You know, Tony Birch talked about his grandmother and it was while he was writing Women and Children. It certainly gives insight into the book that would eventually come out, but the interview was someone just talking about the stories behind the book, and that, for us is what we've tried to do again and again with George Saunders or Roxanne Gay, with Michael and Dacci or Miranda Julive. We got to go to Richard Flanagan's house or Kate Grenville's house,
we got to go to fitzro Pool twice. So it's been a pretty wild ride and we have absolutely loved it.
So this is the final episode that we will be playing of Read This on seven Am, and it's been such a pleasure to share these stories with our audience. For those listeners who want to hear more from the Read This archive or stay looped about what might be next for the show, what should they do?
Yes, the best thing you can do if you're listening to this on seven am is go across to the read This feed and subscribe. If the show does come back, that's where it'll come back, and that's where you'll hear about it, and I encourage you to do so. Also share it with people. The nice thing about these episodes is they're a little bit timeless. Once you start digging into the archive, there's no shortage of things that you can discover and listen to, and it's a deeply pleasurable thing.
The only other thing I wanted to say to you, Ruby and to the rest of the audio team at Schwartz is that for me as editor of the monthly, it's been a real revelation getting to work with the extraordinary audio storytellers who have been part of the Schwartz
team since I started. They've taught me so much much about my own editing practice, about the magazine, about the ways in which we do the kind of publishing that we do and the work that they've done, You've done, all of you on seven AM has been such a privilege to watch. You are incredible professionals. You're incredibly talented, and I'm super excited to keep listening to seven AM and it's new home, and I am sure you will
all go on to continue to do great things. But I just wanted to say personally a big thank you from me. You will make us better at our jobs and you're going to be missed.
Coming up in just a moment. We went to Helen Garanner's house, so.
I'm just she works there.
And this one, Michael, can you check that one so I can make sure that it's coming through This one here Peter paper pict a peck of public.
Great.
Okay, we're in Helen Garner's study. The bookshelves go to the and the crams with books on psychology and piles of international editions of her work. On the desk and notepads where Helen's been writing ideas for future projects. Behind the computer, She's pinned photos, cards, quotes from other writers. It feels almost too intimate to take it all in, and yet I can't help it. Snoop from Schwartz Media.
I'm Michael Williams, and this is the first episode of Read This, the show about the books we love and the stories behind them. In our earliest conversations about making this podcast, we made a list of all our dream guests, and right at the top of it was Helen Garner. So to be in her study is both thrilling and terrifying. I've adored Helen Garner's books for decades, but it's not
just being a fan that makes me nervous. It's because one of Garner's great powers is the clarity with which she sees the world, the fearlessness of her gaze, the sharpness of her judgment. Imagine meeting Helen Garner and having her think you are full devastating. But that perception of Garner is missing the generosity, the curiosity, and the tenderness that runs through her work. And she's a generous host too.
She puts the cakes we've brought to the side for after and we sit down to talk about what she's working on, her views on marriage, and what runs through her head is she goes about every day.
I've noticed lately now that I'm all old and officially old because I'm eighty that I talk to myself a lot. I often think my daughter must hear me from next door, thinking, oh God, what's she raving about? But I so try to think what it is that I'm doing when I'm talking to myself, and I seem to be working things out, but allowed or I'm reliving certain encounters I had with certain people and rewriting them, you know, so that I actually said something or made a point.
Or in the.
Car when I'm driving along, I play out anger. Basically, I invent, invent sounds a little bit too purposeful into my mind, come or float exchanges that I might be having with somebody who might be critical of me for the way I'm just I've just driven, and I think of all sorts of clever put downs and shattering insults.
I do a fair bit of that.
Is that imagined people you're arguing with? Or do you do you retread old arguments as well?
Both? But I noticed one thing I often say in these little scenes that come to.
Mind is how dare you? How dare you take that tone with me?
You know? I talk like that and in your head mistressly sort of way, and it's kind of really.
Enjoyable, if not reprosecuting old arguments or imagining pretend arguments. The other thing that you said you do when you talk to yourself is your problem solving. You're kind of working away at things. Is that a typical part of how your brain works.
No, that's much too organized for what happens to me in those moments. I actually, one thing that happened to me yesterday interested me to think about that is that I've actually been feeling quite well, I think i'd have to say depressed lately since the whole COVID thing ended, and I don't seem to have much shortageois de viev
going on. I have hardly been listening to music, and I used to listen to it all the time, and it's really important to me, and it's just recently it's dawned on me that I hardly ever go and put on a CD anymore. I sort of can't be bothered fighting my way through the drawer and finding it, and I haven't got Spotify and I don't want it, and I think, well, it's almost as if music has left my life. So I thought yesterday, Okay, while I'm hoovering I'll put my ear plugs in and I'll listen to
some music on my phone. I thought, what will I listen to? I thought, okay, I'll listened to Jays Bark's Matthew Passion. So I put that on and I just randomly on YouTube found most exquisite performance of it by the Netherlands Bach Society. I listened to half of Matthew Passion, thinking I was just going to listen for ten minutes, and I found that I was completely absorbed by it and not needing to get up or blow my nose or make a note or turn a switch or do anything.
And I just sat quite still for about an hour and a half listening to the music. And after that I had to turn it off because I had to go to my grandson's footage training. But I felt so revived by listening to it, and I'm so grateful because I thought, I'm not over and done with you know, I'm not a dead fish lying.
On the pavement.
I can actually listen to music and it still means a lot to me, and my mood completely revived. And so then I went down to footy training, which is always fabulous. I love it and I thought, Oh, I suppose I'll wake up in the morning feeling like I did duck again. But I'll wake up this morning thinking Wow, I'm going to jump out of bed and I'm going to do stuff.
And so then I sat down and.
Actually started writing something which I haven't done quite a while. And when I looked up, several hours had passed.
That's a very rare thing.
Is stillness something that comes easily to you, the stillness you describe of listening to the music.
No, it doesn't. It doesn't come easily to me.
I'm always nervy and twitchy and jumping about. I'm noticing that there's removalists next door, and I'm wondering.
Us just what SAIDs that's fine? So that if they're talking in the background, if we don't have that.
It's GUYE delivering a fridge.
They'll be gone in a minute.
That they don't know how to get it in. It's next door.
Can you get what they're saying?
Not just bang it, just bang it through. It'll be fine to be in Helen Ghana's house and know she's been writing something new is exhilarating. But we've had to stop because of trade's coming in and out of the house next door where her daughter and grandsons live. Living next door to her grandsons is a particular joy for Helen. She delights in things like watching them at footage training. In fact, it's this that she's been writing about.
This this whole world of.
Boys on the cusp of being men that I find deeply fascinating and beautiful. All the boys in my grandson's team, they've all got broken voices. You know, they sound like men, and they look not quite like men, but a lot of the I've got big shoulders and they're big, strong boys. But when they come close to you while playing, you see the youth that's still there in their faces. And it's just that strange, kind of magical period before they become totally men.
Are they kind to one another when you watch them as a team, like, is that.
A oh kindness?
Perhaps not quite the word.
I noticed an enormous affection and love between them. There's a kind of joy they take in each other's mighty things that they do. And how when somebody kicks a goal they rush to him and envelop them in enormous hugs. I actually saw one footballer kiss another one on the brow recently.
I was terribly pleased to see that.
See, I've only raised a girl, and I never knew much about I had a brother, but he was much much younger than me, and I didn't have all that much to do with him in childhood. So now I've got these two grandsons, and I've lived with them since they were born, so I've watched them living and growing, and I see how hard it is for boys, a different sort of hardship from girls. Seeing boys close up and sensing I don't know if I would call it
anguish in the case of these boys. I'm sure they had certain moments of extreme on happiness, as everybody does in the ordeal with childhood, but I'd love to know more about it. And I guess that's one reason why I was drawn to looking at the footy.
Team, just to see.
And you watch and you watch, and you watch the training and you watch the matches, and you can see which kids are suffering, not just from the game, but in Some kids take naturally to being in a team and it suits them, and other kids don't know how to do it, and you can see them hovering on the outside, even if they're quite a good players. They don't have that sort of bond on me that perhaps hoping for, so I see, I can take any amount
of this sort of stuff. I actually love watching the training even more than watching the matches.
What I love about that is that it seems your description of yourself as not being a very still person almost seems at odds with that creative process, which is finding something you're fascinated by and watching it and being patient with it. And you know, it sounds like there's a kind of conceptual stillness sitting watching training.
Yes.
Well, that's a very interesting point too, because another time in my life when I've had to sit still for many, many hours is in a court and watching a trial. And sometimes sometimes I'm at training and there's nothing much happening and I'm just watching. I'm thinking, am I bored? I'm thinking this is objectively boring?
But I am not bored.
And that's what I used to think in court when there were really long, boring passive of court behavior, which were lawyers were just droning on.
And even though that's when I realized that this was work I.
Was born to do, because even when it was objectively boring, I was never bored.
Why do you think you're not bored in those situations? Is it not to be pat about it, but is it about the human beings? Like is it you're just endlessly fascinated in watching people?
Yeah? I think it's that.
But it's also when I first started going to courts, I felt so good when I was there, and I couldn't wait to get there every morning, And I thought, why does this make me feel so right? And I came up with an explanation. I thought, it's because my brain, or my intellect and my emotions were both working full bore, but they were working in concert with each other and not clashing against each other, which is how often we think about the intellect and the emotions that they're kind
of we're going to say enemies, but opponents. But when they work smoothly together, that's when you feel this strange kind of joy I suppose.
Coming up after the break, Helen tells us about the intellectual and emotional task of revisiting her old diaries and what that's shown her about marriage. Welcome Back. One of my friends, a fellow Helen Ghana Tragic will often quote from a twenty sixteen piece that describes Garna's defining characteristic as an awakeness and a liveness to the thinness of things.
I like this quote for me. The deep pleasure of reading Ghna lies in her precision, so sharp, not a word wasted going into this interview where our favorite garner. For me, it's the children's bark. For our producer, Clara monkey Grip. Around the office, there were advocates for just about everything she's done, fans of her court reporting and her collected essays. The Spare Room rated more than one mention. Her most recent books are three volumes of her diaries.
They range from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen ninety eight, and in nothing short of astonishing. The third volume, How to End a Story, is as detailed and real an account of the breakdown of a marriage as you could read. Reading the diaries, you feel like you really know Helen. They're shockingly intimate. No one is spared, least of all her, so it's not surprising that her fans of all ages
connect with her and want to write to her. So the young new generation of Helen Gharana readers will be coming to you not just for kind of writing advice, but even life advice. Do you find that there's a lot of you know, dear Helen, please advice on marriage?
No, no, I don't get I get people telling me their stories, but they don't seem to be asking for advice. It's more like, well, you know what, women tell their stories of rage and sadness, and they appreciate it when some other woman sort of shrieks over it with them. People will say, oh my god, you know, I read what happened to you on page so and so and and this reminded me of such and such a you know,
they'll give an incident from there. This is in emails from strangers, and I just hugely enjoyed that they're not asking for advice.
Basically, I'm pitching to you an agony. Aren't Colin and the Month play where it's Hell and Advisors. I think we would get a huge update.
My advice would be get out now, is one answer. That's one great thing about not being married anymore and being old being you know, when the world of romances is over and it's like that's all over and.
You go into this wonderful world.
Of freedom, you can be friends with men in ways that you know when you're still out there in the sort of dating world, or if you've still got hopes that you're going to meet some guy that you'd like to live with or or sleep with or something you know, and all that's just plainly overs It's wonderful. It's like having swum across a raging torrent and you're standing on the opposite bank, and you know, I look back and I see all these other women thrashing their way across.
I don't want to say, keep swimming. It's great over here.
That's an unexpected part of your advice, Colgide. I mean the amazing achievement that is the three volumes of the diaries and absolute privilege to read it as a reader. But for you, I'm going to think them revisiting them, editing them, but literally immersing yourself in your own past. Were you surprised by finding what younger Helen where she was, what she needed to do, her understanding of herself?
Yeah, well I felt going through those old diaries. I was quite shocked sometimes by what a wimp I was and what I put up with. Points at which I didn't spit the dummy or say this isn't how.
I want to live. You know, I don't want to live like this? Why am I still here?
Luna used to draw these cartoons of angels flying in the sky and they had these little kind of fluttering nighties on and little wings on their backs, and they'd be looking down at all the human beings on the earth kind of tearing each other apart, and the angels would have their hands up to their faces like this, and their faces would be distorted with horror as they look down on what people were doing. And when I was doing the diaries, off that that's what it was
like to do the diaries. I couldn't change anything that was there. All I could do was just look down in horror within my nighty flapping in the breeze. It's really awful actually talking about with you now. I'm thinking maybe that's one reason of being kind of depressed and loan spirits, because it takes a lot of getting over dragging yourself through that sort of stuff.
Oh, I hadn't thought of that.
That's ridiculous that I hadn't thought of it.
It's an extraordinary thing to go through lost, disappointment, all of that stuff to unearth it. I mean, it's in public, in public, yeah, mother. What a strange thing. Forget therapy, unearthing your old diaries and sharing them with the world seems kind of excoriating.
Well, it sort of was.
And yet I've been amazed to find how many people have got in touch with me about them. I'm in strangers, and how many women have said to me, this could be my marriage, and I've found that really shocking.
It's made me realize again that.
Marriage is terribly, terribly difficult, and it's.
Not really set up for the flourishing of women.
With the release of the diaries and with your backlist being picked up overseas in a way that it hasn't necessarily been published before. Something that I take great pleasure from is finding people who are discovering alan Ghana at this point and feel like, you know, have you heard of Helen Ganna? She's fantastic. I had a colleague at an old job who my first day and I went in and above her desk and her office were photos
and like pictures of you from magazines and things. It was like Shay Gavara, but it was you, And she was maybe twenty two twenty three and was just an obsessive fan. Is it strange? Having a different.
Relationship with fantastic.
Thank you for telling me that that's really wonderful. Yeah, well, I don't know how to even think about that. I'm just terribly happy about it, because you know, you write books and the years pass and you think, well, I wrote that book thirty five years ago, forty years ago, but it's still in print. I mean, this is amazing to me. It's amazing to me that Monkey Group is still in print. I don't know what I expected. I
never had any kind of thought out ambition. Young people now, I know, have a much clearer idea, if you know, they would use an expression like my career, which I never would have.
But I think that maybe my work falls.
It's sort of it's in a territory that's between older things and then there's all these newer things. But I'm just still sitting there and I don't know what that means, but pretty pleased about it.
From my perspective, I think it means that there's such integrity to the work. There's no looking over your shoulder on the page. It seems like it's all there. And yet the thing that struck me reading the diaries was how omnipresent self doubt an anxiety was through all of that.
See, the thing that happens is just say the book like The Children's Bark, which I think is like technically the best thing I've ever written. People talk about it, you know, respectfully, and then if I go back and look at it and open it up, I think, gosh, it is actually really good. And how did I do it? I don't remember how I did it, and I think I must have been in almost like a different person back then. I must have been going through a period of where I was sort of calm and organized and
my thoughts were working. And then one day when subsequent to that, I was trying to write another book and groaning and tearing out the hair over it, and I sort of flung myself back on the couch in my workroom next to the bookshelf, and I saw this little notebook sticking out, and I pulled it out, and what's this? And I looked and it was a little diary that I'd been keeping around the time I was writing The
Children's Bark. And it showed me that The Children's Buck didn't just flow out fully formed from the head of use.
You know, it was awful. I was going, oh, why did I overstart this?
And I've got all these fucking characters and I don't know how to make them do things, and what on earth?
I had no idea what I was doing.
That's what I'm getting at, and that surprises me.
Thinking about your anxiety is about writing now, and you know, what if I've lost it or what if it's not the reading your diaries, you seem to have those exact same anxieties. That doesn't seem to be about being eighty. It seems to have been as present when you're forty.
Yeah, as it is now.
Yes, but doesn't everyone feel that sort of self doubt?
Yes, but I don't think everyone creates a body of work, the masterpieces. I mean, at some point it might be okay to be I'm Helen fucking Gunner.
It's okay.
I don't feel self doubt anymore.
Yeah, No, I don't think I'll ever feel like that. The time when I feel the most competent probably is if somebody says, ask me to read something that they've written, and I can see what is wrong with it, and I can see how I could fix it. You see, I think when in doubt cut it out.
That's my rule.
And sometimes it really hurts to cut something out because it's a darling.
And you have to murder it. But people should murder them more.
That's all I'm saying. People don't want to slaughter their own work. They don't, you know, they drag it out of their guts with pain and suffering.
But that doesn't mean.
It's any good just because you dragged it out of your guts.
No, sometimes the opposite.
Yeah, Yeah, I'm interested. I'm interested in this stuff. I mean, see, because I really like sentences. I just love them, and I love the way you build them, and I'm sort of really I'm kind of in love with grammar and syntax. It's really important to me. And when people say it's not important, I get completely frantic.
Yeah, there's a wonderful passage in that third volume of your Diaries where you imagine a future for yourself, where young Helen imagines a future for herself and imagines living closer to your daughter potentially eventual grandchildren, and that you know, you're imagining what it would be to be a grandmother.
You're thinking about going to gigs and catching up with friends and having a drink and walking the streets and one of the beautiful joyous things about reading that in the book was thinking, it's more or less a pretty accurate description.
It came true. But you know the other thing about that fantasy when I had it was that that was when I was in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and I had this lovely fantasy about one day I'm going to be out of this a mess I'm in and I'm going to have this wonderful life and I'm going to have the iron set up permanently and anyway, So I go to shrink the next day and I say, oh, I was just thinking yesterday about you know, one day oh blah blah blah. And I explained this fantasy to her and she.
Said, yes, well it is just a fantasy.
Of course, that's another fantasy of escape. And I thought, oh, like she threw the huge bucket of cold water over me, which I needed, because having a fantasy of your life being better is not part of getting yourself out of the mess that you're in.
You don't think it gives you something to motivate you to get out of that.
Maybe, but no, I mean her point was, her point was always to me that you have to feel this you've got to feel what you're going through. And I found that terribly bracing and useful. I'm suddenly thinking. We read the book Gilgamesh in our reading group a couple of years ago, and there's a scene in Gilgamesh where he's underground.
He's in some.
Frightful dark chasm or cave, and he's thrashing his way along and he's got no idea which way is up or whether there's a hole out of which you can drag himself, and he just has to keep going and keep going and keep going, and it's excruciating.
But eventually he glimpses.
This light, a tiny speck of light, and he thrashes his way towards it, and he finds that there's an opening, and he comes out into the air. And then the line of the poem says, and then Gilgamesh saw the sea.
It was so wonderful.
But I suppose, I mean, Gilgamesh wasn't down there thinking, oh, geez, I wish I could see the sea.
I mean, well, one day I'm going to see the sea.
He was just fighting his way through the blackness, and I sometimes think that's maybe what she was telling me. I had to do just stay right in it, you know, and not in the middle.
Of the fight.
Yeah. Hey, let's go and eat the cakes. Yeah, we'll just leave all this.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Read This. As I mentioned earlier, if you want to dive further into the show, oh you can search for it. Where have you listen to podcasts?