AustLit

'Sometimes when we read, and never quite when we expect it, there are encounters that feel like a recognition. They lodge within us: I have friends who call these burrs in the brain, or splinters – but to me they’ve never felt like foreign bodies, stuck on or stuck in the skin. They go deeper. They become a part of who we are. Living within me like this, I know, is a single image from The Grass Sister, the first of Gillian Mears’ books that I ever read. A snapshot: it’s from a small and deeply intimate scene between the protagonist Avis and her lover Lavinia; the pair are lying in bed and one of them – I think it is Avis, but can’t be sure – admires the soft and downy line of darker hair running down the other’s lower belly, beneath her navel. Snail trail, I sometimes hear this now, although when I first read the book, just over ten years ago, I had never heard that term. I’d never seen one on another woman (though not for lack of trying) and was strangely ashamed of my own – but for Avis, it is not only beautiful and individual but electric: erotically charged, terribly and irresistibly so.' (Introduction)

'A new biography captures the enigmatic Australian writer'

'In 2011, Bernadette Brennan convened a symposium on ‘Narrative and Healing’ at the University of Sydney, an opportunity for specialists in medicine and bereavement to meet writers with comparable interests. Helen Garner, for example, spoke about Joe Cinque’s Consolation. The day included an audiovisual piece about death as a kind of homecoming, with reference to the prodigal son, and exquisite photographs, including a picture of an elderly Irishman wheeling a bicycle with a coffin balanced on the seat and handlebars: austere and moving, a vision of austere and careful final transportation. Since 2011, Bernadette Brennan has written two literary biographies: A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her work (2017); and the wonderfully titled Leaping into Waterfalls: The enigmatic Gillian Mears. As with the Symposium, each biography is a genuine enquiry, a gathering of unexpected elements, and an invitation to later conversation. Brennan writes of Leaping into Waterfalls as an extension of a conversation she had with Mears in 2012. The Mears biography is certain to be a talking point for years to come.'(Introduction)