AustLit

'It's 45 years since Helen Garner published Monkey Grip and perhaps a while later that people realised how fine a writer she was. In 1997 there was that shock of recognition that someone had succeeded in re-creating inner-urban Melbourne, the 'aqua profunda' part of the Fitzroy pool, the tumult and tumbling from bed to bed of shared housing, the heartache of loving a junkie. The initial response to Monkey Grip was a response to a literary brave new world that was also the translation of something real. Indeed, there were critics such as the late Peter Pierce who said that Helen Garner had just talked dirty and called it realism. Yes, and along with this, there was the persistent accusation that she had simply published her diaries and served them up as fiction. This last point had come to seem like the most vulgar misprision by the time I wrote a full-dress defence of Garner in Judith Brett's Meanjin in the mid 1980s.' (Publication abstract)

'Working in the archives of living writers provides exciting possibilities for extended interpersonal research as well as ethical challenges. This article explores the author’s experience of working in Helen Garner’s restricted archives and negotiating the demands of scholarly objectivity with an increasingly felt empathic engagement. The author traces a chronological path through the archives relating to Garner’s three substantial works of non-fiction: The First Stone (1995), Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014). She draws attention to some of the ways in which distance and objectivity can be influenced not only by contact with a living writer but also by the space in which the archive is encountered. With a deliberate focus on the lived experience of researching, rather than a scholarly examination of archival theory, the author offers a case study of how the interaction of archives and living subject can shape research and publication.'  (Publication abstract)