The novelist and nonfiction writer on her love of courtroom drama, the trials of cancel culture and why she wouldn’t have been a good psychoanalyst
Helen Garner was born in Geelong, Australia, in 1942. She worked as a teacher and as a journalist before her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977. Garner has since published novels, stories, screenplays and several volumes of her diaries, but she may be best known for her acclaimed nonfiction, which includes The First Stone (1995), about a university college principal who is accused of groping two female students, and This House of Grief (2014), which tells the story of Robert Farquharson, on trial for the murder of his three sons. In 2016, she was awarded the Windham-Campbell literature prize for nonfiction. New editions of three of Garner’s best-known books have just been published in the UK.
For a long time, you were Australia’s great secret. How do you feel about all the new attention you’re getting in the US and the UK?
I guess it would be annoying if I’d had hopes, in all those years, that I’d ever get published outside Australia. But strangely, I never did. I’m aware this sounds like “little me” talk. But in Australia, in my generation and among those who were slightly older like Germaine [Greer], people would get their books published in London first, and then come back to us. You had to get out of here! That was everybody’s aim, because everything important happened somewhere else. I never felt I had to get out, though. Perhaps this was because I wasn’t really an intellectual. I was just somebody with a pathetic third-class degree who taught in high school.
Monkey Grip, The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief (with an introduction by Rachel Cooke) are published by W&N (£9.99) in the UK and by Text in Australia. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copies at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
