June 28, 2025 • 30 mins
In this inaugural episode of Read This, host Michael Williams and founding editor Sarah McVeigh head to Helen Garner’s house for cake and conversation. Helen shares what she’s writing about, how she problem solves, and the inspiration she gets from watching her grandson’s footy training.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
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
(00:23):
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
(00:44):
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
(01:06):
reflect on the amazing guests and incredible conversations that you've
had on the show and see just how far you've come.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
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,
(01:36):
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
(01:57):
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
(02:17):
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,
(02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
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?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:00):
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
(04:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Coming up in just a moment. We went to Helen
Garanner's house, so.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
I'm just she works there.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Great.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
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.
(05:16):
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
(05:38):
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
(06:02):
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
(06:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
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,
(06:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Or in the.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
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
(07:30):
of all sorts of clever put downs and shattering insults.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
I do a fair bit of that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Is that imagined people you're arguing with? Or do you
do you retread old arguments as well?
Speaker 4 (07:44):
Both? But I noticed one thing I often say in
these little scenes that come to.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Mind is how dare you? How dare you take that
tone with me?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
You know? I talk like that and in your head
mistressly sort of way, and it's kind of really.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
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
(08:36):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:19):
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
(09:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
On the pavement.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
And so then I sat down and.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
Actually started writing something which I haven't done quite a while.
And when I looked up, several hours had passed.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
That's a very rare thing.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Is stillness something that comes easily to you, the stillness
you describe of listening to the music.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
No, it doesn't. It doesn't come easily to me.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
I'm always nervy and twitchy and jumping about. I'm noticing
that there's removalists next door, and I'm wondering.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Us just what SAIDs that's fine? So that if they're
talking in the background, if we don't have that.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
It's GUYE delivering a fridge.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
They'll be gone in a minute.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
That they don't know how to get it in. It's
next door.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
Can you get what they're saying?
Speaker 2 (11:10):
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.
(11:32):
She delights in things like watching them at footage training.
In fact, it's this that she's been writing about.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
This this whole world of.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
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
(12:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Are they kind to one another when you watch them
as a team, like, is that.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
A oh kindness?
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Perhaps not quite the word.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I was terribly pleased to see that.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:31):
I was drawn to looking at the footy.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Team, just to see.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
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
(13:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
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?
Speaker 3 (14:53):
But I am not bored.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And even though that's when I realized that this was
work I.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Was born to do, because even when it was objectively boring,
I was never bored.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
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?
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah? I think it's that.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
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,
(15:50):
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
(16:11):
kind of joy I suppose.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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
(16:40):
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.
(17:01):
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,
(17:23):
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
(17:45):
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?
Speaker 4 (18:00):
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
(18:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
You go into this wonderful world.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
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
(19:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
I don't want to say, keep swimming. It's great over here.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
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,
(20:00):
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?
Speaker 4 (20:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I want to live. You know, I don't want to
live like this? Why am I still here?
Speaker 4 (20:36):
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
(20:58):
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
(21:22):
loan spirits, because it takes a lot of getting over
dragging yourself through that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Oh, I hadn't thought of that.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
That's ridiculous that I hadn't thought of it.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Well, it sort of was.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
It's made me realize again that.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Marriage is terribly, terribly difficult, and it's.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Not really set up for the flourishing of women.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
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
(22:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Relationship with fantastic.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
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
(23:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
But I think that maybe my work falls.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
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
(24:25):
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?
(24:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
You know, it was awful. I was going, oh, why
did I overstart this?
Speaker 4 (25:01):
And I've got all these fucking characters and I don't
know how to make them do things, and what on earth?
Speaker 3 (25:08):
I had no idea what I was doing.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
That's what I'm getting at, and that surprises me.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, as it is now.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Yes, but doesn't everyone feel that sort of self doubt?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
It's okay.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I don't feel self doubt anymore.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
That's my rule.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
And sometimes it really hurts to cut something out because
it's a darling.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
And you have to murder it. But people should murder
them more.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
But that doesn't mean.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
It's any good just because you dragged it out of
your guts.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
No, sometimes the opposite.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
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
(27:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
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
(27:54):
just thinking yesterday about you know, one day oh blah
blah blah. And I explained this fantasy to her and she.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Said, yes, well it is just a fantasy.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
You don't think it gives you something to motivate you
to get out of that.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
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
(28:46):
he's underground.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
He's in some.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
But eventually he glimpses.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
It was so wonderful.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
But I suppose, I mean, Gilgamesh wasn't down there thinking, oh, geez,
I wish I could see the sea.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
I mean, well, one day I'm going to see the sea.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Of the fight.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Yeah. Hey, let's go and eat the cakes. Yeah, we'll
just leave all this.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
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?
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
(00:23):
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
(00:44):
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
(01:06):
reflect on the amazing guests and incredible conversations that you've
had on the show and see just how far you've come.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
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,
(01:36):
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
(01:57):
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
(02:17):
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,
(02:39):
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.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
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?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
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
(03:39):
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
(04:00):
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
(04:20):
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.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Coming up in just a moment. We went to Helen
Garanner's house, so.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
I'm just she works there.
Speaker 2 (04:45):
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.
Speaker 4 (04:53):
Great.
Speaker 2 (04:53):
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.
(05:16):
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
(05:38):
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
(06:02):
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
(06:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
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,
(06:56):
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.
Speaker 3 (07:08):
Or in the.
Speaker 4 (07:09):
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
(07:30):
of all sorts of clever put downs and shattering insults.
Speaker 3 (07:35):
I do a fair bit of that.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
Is that imagined people you're arguing with? Or do you
do you retread old arguments as well?
Speaker 4 (07:44):
Both? But I noticed one thing I often say in
these little scenes that come to.
Speaker 3 (07:49):
Mind is how dare you? How dare you take that
tone with me?
Speaker 4 (07:54):
You know? I talk like that and in your head
mistressly sort of way, and it's kind of really.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
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.
Speaker 4 (08:14):
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
(08:36):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:19):
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
(09:42):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:57):
On the pavement.
Speaker 4 (09:57):
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.
Speaker 3 (10:18):
And so then I sat down and.
Speaker 4 (10:19):
Actually started writing something which I haven't done quite a while.
And when I looked up, several hours had passed.
Speaker 3 (10:26):
That's a very rare thing.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Is stillness something that comes easily to you, the stillness
you describe of listening to the music.
Speaker 3 (10:34):
No, it doesn't. It doesn't come easily to me.
Speaker 4 (10:38):
I'm always nervy and twitchy and jumping about. I'm noticing
that there's removalists next door, and I'm wondering.
Speaker 2 (10:49):
Us just what SAIDs that's fine? So that if they're
talking in the background, if we don't have that.
Speaker 3 (10:53):
It's GUYE delivering a fridge.
Speaker 4 (10:57):
They'll be gone in a minute.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
That they don't know how to get it in. It's
next door.
Speaker 4 (11:03):
Can you get what they're saying?
Speaker 2 (11:10):
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.
(11:32):
She delights in things like watching them at footage training.
In fact, it's this that she's been writing about.
Speaker 3 (11:41):
This this whole world of.
Speaker 4 (11:44):
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
(12:06):
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.
Speaker 2 (12:17):
Are they kind to one another when you watch them
as a team, like, is that.
Speaker 4 (12:21):
A oh kindness?
Speaker 3 (12:24):
Perhaps not quite the word.
Speaker 4 (12:25):
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.
Speaker 3 (12:44):
I was terribly pleased to see that.
Speaker 4 (12:46):
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
(13:07):
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
(13:31):
I was drawn to looking at the footy.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Team, just to see.
Speaker 4 (13:35):
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
(13:56):
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.
Speaker 2 (14:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (14:33):
Yes.
Speaker 4 (14:34):
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?
Speaker 3 (14:53):
But I am not bored.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
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.
Speaker 3 (15:04):
And even though that's when I realized that this was
work I.
Speaker 4 (15:08):
Was born to do, because even when it was objectively boring,
I was never bored.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
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?
Speaker 3 (15:26):
Yeah? I think it's that.
Speaker 4 (15:27):
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,
(15:50):
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
(16:11):
kind of joy I suppose.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
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
(16:40):
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.
(17:01):
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,
(17:23):
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
(17:45):
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?
Speaker 4 (18:00):
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
(18:22):
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.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
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.
Speaker 4 (18:43):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:00):
You go into this wonderful world.
Speaker 4 (19:03):
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
(19:23):
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.
Speaker 3 (19:32):
I don't want to say, keep swimming. It's great over here.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
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,
(20:00):
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?
Speaker 4 (20:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:30):
I want to live. You know, I don't want to
live like this? Why am I still here?
Speaker 4 (20:36):
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
(20:58):
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
(21:22):
loan spirits, because it takes a lot of getting over
dragging yourself through that sort of stuff.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Oh, I hadn't thought of that.
Speaker 4 (21:29):
That's ridiculous that I hadn't thought of it.
Speaker 2 (21:32):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:50):
Well, it sort of was.
Speaker 4 (21:51):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:05):
It's made me realize again that.
Speaker 4 (22:06):
Marriage is terribly, terribly difficult, and it's.
Speaker 3 (22:10):
Not really set up for the flourishing of women.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
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
(22:36):
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.
Speaker 3 (22:54):
Relationship with fantastic.
Speaker 4 (22:55):
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
(23:16):
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.
Speaker 3 (23:29):
But I think that maybe my work falls.
Speaker 4 (23:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
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.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
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
(24:25):
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?
(24:46):
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.
Speaker 3 (24:57):
You know, it was awful. I was going, oh, why
did I overstart this?
Speaker 4 (25:01):
And I've got all these fucking characters and I don't
know how to make them do things, and what on earth?
Speaker 3 (25:08):
I had no idea what I was doing.
Speaker 4 (25:10):
That's what I'm getting at, and that surprises me.
Speaker 2 (25:14):
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.
Speaker 3 (25:32):
Yeah, as it is now.
Speaker 4 (25:34):
Yes, but doesn't everyone feel that sort of self doubt?
Speaker 2 (25:39):
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.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
It's okay.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
I don't feel self doubt anymore.
Speaker 4 (25:53):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:15):
That's my rule.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
And sometimes it really hurts to cut something out because
it's a darling.
Speaker 3 (26:19):
And you have to murder it. But people should murder
them more.
Speaker 4 (26:24):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:31):
But that doesn't mean.
Speaker 4 (26:32):
It's any good just because you dragged it out of
your guts.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
No, sometimes the opposite.
Speaker 4 (26:38):
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.
Speaker 2 (26:58):
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
(27:22):
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.
Speaker 4 (27:32):
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
(27:54):
just thinking yesterday about you know, one day oh blah
blah blah. And I explained this fantasy to her and she.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Said, yes, well it is just a fantasy.
Speaker 4 (28:02):
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.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
You don't think it gives you something to motivate you
to get out of that.
Speaker 4 (28:22):
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
(28:46):
he's underground.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
He's in some.
Speaker 4 (28:48):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:06):
But eventually he glimpses.
Speaker 4 (29:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:22):
It was so wonderful.
Speaker 4 (29:24):
But I suppose, I mean, Gilgamesh wasn't down there thinking, oh, geez,
I wish I could see the sea.
Speaker 3 (29:29):
I mean, well, one day I'm going to see the sea.
Speaker 4 (29:32):
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.
Speaker 2 (29:42):
Of the fight.
Speaker 3 (29:42):
Yeah. Hey, let's go and eat the cakes. Yeah, we'll
just leave all this.
Speaker 1 (29:54):
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.
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