Being hated is very bracing': Helen Garner on surviving three marriages and being called a 'rotten feminist' - The Guardian

Helen Garner Reflects on Five Decades of Unsparing Prose and Public Backlash

When Helen Garner first imagined writing a book about Australian rules football, her heart soared before immediately sinking at the dreary prospect of having to read the rulebook. The impetus for the project was her teenage grandson, Ambrose, who played for a local team, and Garner enjoyed watching them play. People she mentioned the idea to assumed she would write a polemic about societal violence, prompting her to dismiss the notion as a bore. As noted in The Guardian, the 83-year-old Melbourne writer thrives on going off in unauthorized directions rather than following predictable paths.

Wonderful review of Helen Garner in The TimesThe agony and ecstasy of being an Australian footie grandmahttps://t.co/RKVK0URKff pic.twitter.com/FzZDRGbL5S

— https://x.com/MsMountebank/status/2115545921631162567

Garner occupies that tiny category of writers famous enough to be recognized in public, often stopped by strangers offering strong views on her work. That dynamic has helped her cultivate a sharp obstinacy against bossy opinions. Rather than penning sociological explainers on Aussie rules football, she focused on a single season of Ambrose’s U16s team, the Flemington Colts, crafting what she describes as a nanna’s book. At library publicity events, she found the first five rows packed with white-haired women holding hankies, noting that nobody really writes about what nannas are actually like beyond sentimentality.

Surviving Literary Scrutiny and the Backlash Over The First Stone

That commitment to unsparing realism has occasionally landed Garner in spectacular trouble while building deep devotion among readers. Last year, the publication of her diaries earned her the Baillie Gifford prize, cementing her status as an erudite yet comically down-to-earth literary figure. Reflecting on her 1995 book The First Stone—which examined an alleged college groping case at the University of Melbourne and questioned whether female students had overreacted—Garner admitted she gave a lot of people the shits. She faced intense hostility, was called a rotten feminist and a heretic, and heard threats from award judging panels.

I had the shit kicked out of me! People savaged me, she told The Guardian, noting that surviving the backlash left her feeling free to write what she truly wanted. It’s not destructive. Well, it could be; if I’d published that book now … but the internet didn’t exist then.

From Monkey Grip to Global Recognition

Garner’s literary career spans nearly 50 years, beginning with her 1977 debut novel, Monkey Grip, which chronicled her bohemian life in Melbourne shared houses and her relationship with a heroin addict. Written with the unselfconscious energy of a young author, the book caused a sensation in Australia.

Outside Australia, Garner spent decades largely ignored or condescended to by international critics, famously dismissed by the TLS in 1987 as writing Mills & Boon for bohemians. Today, however, she fills 900-seat venues in New York, sees her back catalogue reissued in the US, and is hailed as a contender for the Nobel prize, with high-profile nods from Dua Lipa’s podcast and Carrie Bradshaw carrying This House of Grief in And Just Like That…. Unfazed by the late-career mania, Garner shrugs off prizes, describing herself as an old kind of warhorse who was never interested in them in the first place.