Helen garner

Arrangements in Blue by Amy Key British poet, Amy Key, uses Joni Mitchell’s seminal album Blue, to guide the themes of her memoir – love, companionship, friendship, jealously, and desire. Initially, I was absorbed by Key’s honesty, her yearning, and her resistance to ‘giving up’ on the prospect of romantic love. I know that if you ask yourself hard questions, you must be prepared not to find an answer. You must be prepared to admit sometimes your questions rise from self-pity, helplessness, envy… However, the reliance on Joni Mitchell’s album forced Key into a thematic corner in a couple of parts. For the most part, I could overlook the bits that felt laboured, given Key’s insight and self-reflection on some difficult topics – What is the secret of people who have mastered the fear of loss enough to take parenting on? How do they sleep? I can’t help but feel it’s the security, the faith of romantic love, that gives people the reliance and optimism to try. There are plenty of books about being single, and about choosing not to have a child – Arrangements in Blue is a poetic (!) addition to that group. 3/5 Love Unedited by Caro Llewellyn A love story, spanning decades, using the literary and publishing scene as a backdrop? Yes please! I pounced on this one but unfortunately it fell short. There were elements of this novel that I enjoyed, notably the glimpses of cities (New York and Melbourne) and the subtle reveal of multiple plot lines. However, the different voices lacked distinction (which was problematic for one character, Edna, whose story is told in two parts – her lived experience and then what she writes in her memoir). As a result the novel is uneven and never really finds pace. There were also some odd and completely unnecessary bits of info-dumping – about American politics, sustainable cooking, and fly-fishing – I wish Llewellyn’s editor had been firmer! 2.5/5 The First Stone by Helen Garner I was at Melbourne Uni when the events that are the subject of this book took place. And I read it as soon as it was released – you would’ve had to have been living under a stone not to know about it at the time. On my first reading, I can’t recall what I felt about Garner’s take on the situation, nor my opinion on where she was on the ‘spectrum’ of feminism but what I do remember is that this book sparked conversations with friends akin to today’s #MeToo discussions. And regardless of the decade, these discussions are very important for people to have. Garner’s observations about power are just as relevant now as they were in the nineties (perhaps a sad indictment that things haven’t really changed…). The audio version of this book is read by Garner – I always like listening to authors reading their own work. But best of all, there’s a bunch of essays included at the end that detail the legal and publishing fiasco that surrounded The First Stone – very interesting stuff. 4/5

Dr Toni Lindsay is a Clinical and Health Psychologist who has been working with both adults and adolescents since 2007. Her recent book, Everything Anxiety Ever Told You is a Lie, is her fifth. The Certainty Myth (2022) and The Cancer Companion (2021), as well as two textbooks — ACT at the End (2024) and Cancer, Sex, Drugs and Death (2017) — are all about the use of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). Toni works at Chris O’Brien Lifehouse in the Oncology service and is a specialist in the care of Adolescents and Young Adults with cancer. She also teaches in the Department of Adolescent Medicine at the University of Melbourne and the University of Sydney Nursing School. I’m a huge admirer of both Toni’s work and her writing, so it was an absolute pleasure to invite her to The Reading Lists. When someone asks ‘What do you do for a living?’, how do you respond? It probably depends on the context! Some people can behave strangely when they meet a psychologist out in the wild, and so sometimes it might take me some time to let people know what my job is. People are genuinely interested in psychology often, so it’s nice to chat about the ways that it works. In reverse though, I am always wondering how different jobs work, so I will be peppering those questions right back when I meet a new person! What are you reading at the moment? I am actually reading a couple of books — I don’t normally — but I am enjoying Helen Garner’s new book The Season and Irwin Yalom’s book Hour of the Heart. Both are writers that are a pleasure to read, and so I am savouring them. Alongside, I have also been reading a few non-fiction books around all the tech stuff happening in the U.S. — so have just finished Kara Swisher’s Burn Book. When you think about your childhood, what book comes to mind? I loved reading as a kid — and had a suite of Golden Books — Cookie Monster and the Cookie Tree is the first one that comes to mind! The lessons have showed up in my adult life more than once! As I got older I found my way to series like the Babysitters club, and then fell deep into crime fiction at a young age (maybe too young in retrospect!) What did you want to be growing up? A vet, and later a forensic pathologist (modelled on the ’90s fiction heroines of course) — as it turns out, I don’t have the stomach for either!!! What do you think your school-aged self would think of you now? I think she would think it’s all worked out okay. School was tricky for me for a bunch of reasons and I think that confused little kiddo didn’t know how it would all go. I am glad that it has worked out the way it has! If you could wrap up a single book and gift it to yourself on your 21st birthday, what book would you choose and why? Oh gosh. These questions aren’t getting any easier! I don’t think I have an answer for this. All I can think of are the books that I return to over and over again — things like The Spare Room by Helen Garner, Salvation Creek by Susan Duncan, Wintering by Katherine May and The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. These are books that have arrived in my life at the exact time that I need them, and they have brought such a warm comfort. Do you have any books that you strongly associate with important people in your life? Too many to name! One of the most generous things I think you can do is take someone’s reading suggestion, and to be open to loving it as much as they do. Which book have you recommended most to friends and family? Lately, I would say Cold Enough for Snow by Jessica Au. It’s a beautiful novella about the complex relationships in families. I found myself thinking about it for days after I finished it. Do you prefer fiction or non-fiction? Ebooks, audiobooks or physical books? I like both non fiction and fiction, but my fiction reading outpaces the non fiction by miles. I love a physical book, although I have a kindle to make life easier. I am a heavy user of my local library. What’s the best book you’ve read in the last six months? What You are Looking For is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama. I love Japanese fiction, and this spoke so clearly and beautifully in the way that a gentle and articulate author can do. Name a book that you feel everyone should read. Listen by Kathryn Mannix — she is a palliative care physician, but Listen talks so elegantly about the ways that we communicate, and why relationships and hearing what people are really saying are the most important things that we have, particularly at tricky times. Which book do you feel has had the biggest impact on your life? The Great Gatsby — I first read this for high school and have read it many many times since, and every time I find a new perspective, or a piece that I hadn’t thought about before. Are there any books you haven’t already mentioned that you’d want to include on your ‘Top 10’ reading list? What I haven’t talked about much, but is such a love of mine, is the genre of crime fiction. As I have gotten older I have found myself less attracted to the gruesome details that were appealing as a young person, but more into the complexity of our humanness. I will still buy every Patricia Cornwell novel when they come out (even if I do not feel attached in the way I did when I was younger), but particularly love the crime coming from Australian authors now. Please tell us briefly about your latest book. Everything Anxiety Ever Told You Is a Lie: *Well, almost everything! is aimed at young people who are experiencing anxiety in their everyday lives, across the breadth of the anxiety spectrum. It comes from the perspective that anxiety is a very normal part of life, and not some thing that needs to be pathologized! Hopefully, people will learn skills and ideas that they can take with them through their lives. If you enjoyed this interview with Toni Lindsay, please visit her at her website or on LinkedIn.

The theme for this month’s #6Degrees of Separation (book links), as hosted by Kate, is an appealing one for me, because it starts with a travel book. I’ve always loved travelling either in person or via a book, so it’s the perfect combination! I’ve just done a good clearout of my travel guides, because they are so out of date by now that I don’t think even the charity shops will want them. The ones that I loved most, even as a child, were the slim green Michelin guides, which my father and I took in turns to read out loud at the various sights, a habit that I’ve maintained over the years, much to my children’s embarrassment. Anyone who knows my Friday Fun posts will not be surprised to hear that my favourite guide was the one to the Chateaux of the Loire Valley. Obvious first link is to a book taking place in a chateau, and my choice is the Les Rois Maudits series by Maurice Druon, the original Game of Thrones, as George R.R. Martin admits himself. It has also spawned two popular TV series adaptations, but also a parody series on French TV called The Damned Do-Nothing Kings, so that’s my link to the next book, which is a parody. James Finn Garner’s Politically Correct Bedtime Stories was a quite popular parody of fairytales when I first came to London; in fact it was my first present from the young Ph.D. student who later became my husband. He knew I was a feminist and was trying to impress me. I found the stories quite funny at the time, but they haven’t aged well (fair description of the ex-husband too). Very simple next link, to another author named Garner, namely Helen Garner and This House of Grief, the first book of hers I read, about a divorced father who drove the car into a dam when his children were in the back. This book focused more on the court case rather than the background to the tragedy and psychological detail or speculation, like in Emmanuel Carrere’s The Adversary, which is my next link, and which has profound personal resonance, since I lived on the street where that tragedy took place. How can I turn this around from such horrible subjects? By pointing out that there is a delightful and criminally underknown book set very close to the location in The Adversary. It’s a conversation between an out-of-her-depth expat wife and the philosopher Voltaire, who teaches her how to live in her new environment: A Visit from Voltaire by Dinah Lee Küng. The book was longlisted for the then Orange Prize in 2004 (now know as the Women’s Prize), so it’s a shame it seems to have been forgotten. My last link is to a literary prize winner who seems to have been forgotten (at least outside his home country): Harry Martinson, who won the Nobel Prize in 1974 (jointly with another Swedish author Eyvind Johnson). His poetic cycle Aniara sounds intriguing: it’s about a spaceship that wanders off-piste, destined to float eternally through space. This has been a well-travelled post, with a bit of a French dominance. Where will your travel book edition of the Six Degrees meme take you?

Photograph by Jane Breakell. I knew nothing about F. Scott Fitzgerald when I stumbled on Tender Is the Night in 1962. I didn’t know he’d struggled with the book for almost nine years, and that during his lifetime it never settled into a finished version. I was a naive and ignorant twenty-year-old, studying English and French literature at the University of Melbourne, an unawakened literary snob who had hardly read anything twentieth-century American in her life, and was weighed down by the mighty eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and European novels and poetry that we were to study for final examinations. I pulled the Fitzgerald off a shelf in the bookshop where I had a summer job. It was so delicious and joyful to read, I could canter through it with such bright and sudden pleasure, that it felt almost criminal. Secretly I knew it was way too enjoyable to be literature. Two years later, practicing for final exams, we were given a page of prose to translate from English into French. I was a lazy student, barely keeping up, and I dreaded these exercises. I turned over the sheet of paper and was staggered to see that the passage was from Tender Is the Night. On the shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles and the Italian border, stood a large, proud, rose-coloured hotel. Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade, and before it stretched a short dazzling beach. Now it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; in 1925 it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in April; only the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water-lilies among the massed pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes, five miles away. The hotel and its bright tan prayer rug of a beach were one. In the early morning the distant image of Cannes, the pink and cream of old fortifications, the purple Alp that bounded Italy, were cast across the water and lay quavering in the ripples and rings sent up by sea-plants through the clear shallows. Deferential palms cooled its flushed façade? The bright tan prayer rug of the beach? I looked up at the lecturer, a scornful Frenchwoman in her forties. A sardonic smile crossed her face. I put down my pen and lowered my forehead to the desk. Did she think I was regretting all the classes I’d missed, the afternoons I’d spent down in the city watching Westerns and Bergman movies, or drinking and shouting in the beer garden with the architecture students? She was right: I hadn’t a clue how to translate these images—but faced with the impossible task, I was struck dumb for the first time by their depth and richness. She couldn’t have known what a gift she’d handed me. My boxed-in ideas of whose writing could be taken seriously had just been blown sky-high. She probably thought I was panicking, about to cry, but I was taking off my hat and bowing low. I was humbled, freed, and giddy with jubilation.   Helen Garner is an Australian novelist and nonfiction writer whose books include Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach, and The Spare Room. Her Art of Fiction interview appeared in the Fall 2022 issue of The Paris Review.