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Home
Authors
Helen Garner
Australian
Novelist
About the author
Now, I - for several years while I was researching this book, I felt quite obsessed by thoughts about sentencing, punishment, how judges arrive at their decisions.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Now
#Years
#Judges
#Decisions
#Thoughts
#Punishment
We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Hope
#Being
#Government
#Wrong
#Women
But there are some wounds that can never be healed.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Wounds
The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention but the fulfilment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Nature
#Intention
#Meaning
#Rain
The only thing that I was equipped for with my very mediocre college Arts degree was to get a job in teaching.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Teaching
#Job
#College
That's one of the things I hope that the book can do, is to restore some dignity to Joe Cinque.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Hope
#Dignity
People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#People
#Justice
Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Now
#Life
#Money
#Writer
#Fiction
It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Youth
#Woman
#Age
It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Life
#Privilege
I'm very disturbed by violence against women when it is violence.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Violence
#Women
I think writers are very anxious.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Writers
But I can't bear it when somebody who some man made a pass at - to call that violence seems to me absurd and insulting to women who've really met violence, who've been raped or bashed.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Man
#Violence
#Women
I like poking my nose into other people's lives.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#People
But I now think what I was doing, in a completely unconscious way, was getting off the turf where my husband and I might be rivals. We were both working in fiction... so I look back and I see that I consciously vacated the contested ground.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Now
#Unconscious
#HusbFiction
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Life
#People
#Thinking
#Writers
I think some people wished I'd kept myself out of the book. But I kind of insist on it because I want the reader to share my engagement with the material, if you like, not pretend that I'm doing it completely intellectually.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Want
#People
At the time it seemed like a natural development of my interest in what was going on around me in society.
Helen Garner,
Australian
Novelist
#Time
#Society
#Interest
#Development