Poured Over: Helen Garner on The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief

By Jenna Seery / November 28, 2023 at 6:00 am

With the U.S. debut of The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief, Helen Garner’s voice returns in two of her best works — a novel featuring the intricacies of complicated family life and a nonfiction account of one of Australia’s most shocking criminal cases. Garner joins us to talk about how she came to write each of these stories, keeping diaries, the complexities of human character and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.           

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.       

Featured Books (Episode):
The Children’s Bach by Helen Garner
This House of Grief by Helen Garner
Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer
I’m Miwa Messer, the producer and host of Poured Over and Rumaan Alam actually is the one who turned me on to Helen Garner’s novels. And I’m really excited to say, Pantheon is republishing a couple of the early novels and a nonfiction book, we’re going to talk about one of the novels and the nonfiction in this conversation. But Helen, it’s such a treat to finally meet you. I mean, Rumann has been talking about you for a really long time. And I even bought a used copy of The Children’s Bach before I got the new one from pantheon. So I just want to say, I have both now. booksellers, we have multiple copies of things, but it’s really nice to see you. Thank you so much for making the time. So I have a question for you, though, before we really get going, you’re on the road in the United States. And is this the first time you’ve done with a really big tour.

Helen Garner
I’m exhausted too, totally, since it’s such a, it’s such a huge flight to get here, like 25 hours. And it takes days to get on. But I’m having a wonderful time, people are so kind to me, and enjoying it very much.

MM
I’m really happy to hear that, when Rumaan told me about The Children’s Bach and he did that thing that he does also in the introduction to The Children’s Bach, I’m not going to tell you what it’s about. I’m just going to say you need to read this book. And I listened to Rumaan, when it comes to things like this. Right? Not just say, as I was reading this tiny, thin novel, it’s very tightly written. It’s really great. It’s so satisfying. It’s the early 80s. We’re in Australia, but we could be anywhere. Married couple, two young children. College friend of the husband shows up with her younger sister in tow. And then we also need her sort of paramour who moves in, Philip. So we’ve got Dexter, Athena, the two boys, Elizabeth, Vicki, Philip, and then he has an adolescent daughter Poppy, who is really kind of not having it with anyone. It’s a really tight cast. Things happen. I would like to not spoil the things for people who have not yet read this book, because you do a lot of very cool stuff in this book. But it made me think of Paula Fox and Desperate Characters. As I was reading. I was like, Oh, okay. I see sort of the marriage malaise. I mean, I think we’re not really giving anything away there. But the marriage malaise in the way you’re sort of talking about how Dexter sees the world and how Athena sees the world and Elizabeth and Philip, all of the adults are a little akimbo in their way of seeing things. But with The Children’s Bach, you wrote it in the early 80s. Correct?

Came out in 84 so I wrote it in the early 80s.

So you’ve been working as a freelance journalist at that point, Monkey’s Grip had come out in 77. So you’d have a novel behind you. And then my understanding is there was a novel in between that you were kind of like, well, it didn’t really work, but it taught me how to write.

Yeah, I published it. And then I went to France, for I about 18 months. And I never thrived outside of Australia, I have to say, but anyway, while I was there, I thought, well, you Monkey Grip that’s been quite successful, I’ll just do more of the same. And you can’t do that. You know, that’s how I learned that you can’t do that. I cobbled together what I thought was a novel. And I showed it to my publisher, and they said, Helen, it’s terrible. It’s really bad. So I mean, you they really hit me with it. And I sort of cringed away, and I thought, well, there’s some stuff in it, that seems quite good. So I broke it into pieces and kept my stories and just chucked the rest. And it’s not really the high point of my life’s experience, the thing I learned was, you can’t write the same book twice, right. So that’s a good thing to learn, because you can waste a lot of time trying to find something that’s worked, and it’s not going to work again. So I messed around with that for a know year or so. And we came out, nobody liked it much, correctly. And then not enough, something happened and then was going alright, this one, The Children’s Bach. And I’m always saying this to people that I sort of can’t believe that I wrote it. I just don’t know. I mean, I look at it now. And I see it’s got certain it shows certain skills and competence. And I’m sure I got them from because I certainly didn’t have them when I was writing Monkey. Yeah, it was quite a strange experience. And it’s, it’s short, and as you say, it’s kind of compact.

It’s very, it’s really it flies, the book.

So I think it’s only about 35,000 words, maybe 30,000. It’s very short. But it’s got some kind of, you know, it’s sort of substantial. I think, how else did I write… that book is the only novel, real novel that I’ve written, you know, that hangs together like a novel And you know, looks like a novel and smells like them.

I mean, having read Monkey Grip, I can say Monkey Grip, I should also mention for people who haven’t read it yet. I mean, do we want to call it auto fiction? I mean, it’s very closely…

Whatever they like, you know, I used to get, went around for years, defensively saying, you suggest I just published my diary. But, you know, it’s based on it’s based on a lot of experiences that I had. Yeah. And, you know, I don’t mind saying that. It’s loose. It’s very loose textured.

But your prose in The Children’s Bach is much more mature. Yeah. And I was actually going to, I was going to describe it as looser than what I read in monkey grip, because I just I felt like you were more confident telling these stories and letting your characters collide, and letting things go where they were because again, I didn’t feel like I needed to know that I was in a suburb of Melbourne, in 1984. So, thanks. I’m glad you I just I liked the sort of universality of it. I mean, it could have been, you know, Westchester County, New York, it could have been Marin County, California, it, it just had this sort of timelessness and familiarity in a good way. I was just like, okay.

that makes me happy to hear that. Thank you.

Oh, I’m glad. I’m glad to hear that. But, you know, Dexter is sort of figuring out where he is. He’s a little stodgy. He’s a little set in his ways. He’s kind of very old for a young man. His wife has always been married, they do have some stress one of their children. Now, he doesn’t have a diagnosis in the book. But it sounds like he has some sort of delay.

I think he’s autistic. Okay. Because back at the time, when I wrote that book, the word autism wasn’t in current use. Nobody knew what to call these children who were profoundly not cutting it, you know, in their developmental stages. But I didn’t, I didn’t occur to me to name his condition, because I didn’t know what it was.

But I do think it gives reader space to sort of interpret where Dexter and Athena are. Yeah. And, you know, it’s sort of hinted that Dexter had had a crush on Elizabeth, this former classmate, and she sort of pops up. It’s very nicely done, the way you have the meeting at the airport, there were reviews that I saw where people had said, we’ll look at all this domestic drama that she’s writing about. And yet anyone who reads the children’s book knows, there’s a lot of social commentary in this book. And there’s a lot of political commentary in this book. And it’s delightful. It’s really I mean, any book that thinks marriage is maybe not the answer for everyone is pretty okay, in my book, because maybe we should have options, we shouldn’t have options about this marriage thing. But when you sat down to write the children’s book, you of course, you have all of this past experience publishing. But in terms of the story, and in terms of these characters, how did this book start for you,

I had an old friend, who was in a very solid marriage, and had a child who had a sort of symptoms and disorders that this little boy, Billy, has in the book, I was totally moved by the spectacle of a family that had this, this trouble, a deep trouble and a child that, obviously isn’t going to grow up in a normal way. And I was moved by the resolution to incorporate the child into their lives in a, you know, the best way they could? Or why, I don’t know, I just thought, I wonder. That’s a very strong family unit. I thought what would happen if somebody from the other sort of world that I know crashed into that little world what would happen is this character called Philip who recurred? There’s lots of times in my, in my work, and he’s a kind of an archetypal figure is not based on person. But he’s one of those guys who really kind of sexy, rock n roll sort of guy with a rather loose moral fiber, terribly charming, and good looking and funny, and everyone immediately adores him. They’re not someone you could ever depend upon. And he’s the sort of guy who would crash in and out of your life, and it will be a lot of fun, but it would end poorly. And so I just wonder if a guy like that turns up what would happen to a family unit that was so bound by both love and duty to the to the child. So I just chucked them all together and tried to see what happened.

There were a couple of things I thought I saw coming that didn’t happen. And then a couple of things that I was like, oh, yeah, I mean, it is really just emotionally satisfying. I believed that these people would make these decisions and do these things as they played out, and you just you don’t waste words when you’re doing it. It’s there is not an extra comma. There’s none extra. It’s really spare. You’ve kept diaries for a really long time. But I know, I know, some were sort of famously burned before you went to school. And those are not the ones I’m talking about. But giving yourself the freedom to keep a diary like that, does that influence the and I’m not talking about the subject matter. I’m not talking about taking notes from your life. I’m literally talking about the physical craft of story and sort of identifying, you know, the pinch points the before and after the moments that you get in a story that make it interesting. Like, is that part of it for you?

Oh, look, writing diaries. That’s how I learned to write. It is a practice, I still keep one. And I write on it every day, in the morning and an evening, usually twice. And it’s great pleasure to me. I mean, people talk about journaling. And I think I don’t know what they mean by that. I think that, to me, a diary is a lifelong form of practice. And you just write you might be just writing about otherwise boring, daily domestic events, or things you saw in the street. The thing about writing a diary, if you enjoy writing, that’s where you sort of use your linguistic skills and practice what raw material is in there to use. And you can try writing something this way, we can try writing it that way. So you do all of observation, because you want to have something just say, at the end of the day, or record, and writing a diary is, for me, anyway, a great freedom. I like my diary, writing, I like it better than anything else I do, because it’s free. It’s not for a deadline. I’m just doing it purely for pleasure. And just for the pleasure of pushing pan across the page. And all those years of observation, you’ll learn some of the things especially in this book, there’s a couple of things in this book that are composed almost entirely it’s things out of my notebook, which I need to do, I still have a notebook, I don’t use it so much anymore, but I never went anywhere without a notebook and a pen, or write off and write down the way people speak. You know, I just hear somebody’s turn a phrase. And it’s not the sound so much as it’s the way they put words together, or their sort of little trumpeting piece of rhetoric and in daily life, and I make a note of lots of those. And they really come in handy when you’re writing a novel, you took this storehouse of detail that you’ve been collecting for years, and it gives up a treasures at the moment when you need to open it up.

That’s such a great image. But you also kept a separate diary for the book that ultimately became This House of Grief, which is the nonfiction some might call it true crime. I think it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not just the recounting of a crime and a trial.

I wouldn’t call it true crime.

There’s so much happening in this book, and both the case and the retrial happened over seven years. You’re in the courtroom the whole time. I knew nothing about this case, until I read This House of Grief. So would you give listeners a quick synopsis? This is a shocking case. Honestly, it’s the best way to describe it shocking case that happened in Australia.

Yeah, I can briefly sum it up. A man and his wife lived in a small town in the country outside Melbourne. They had three little boys. And he was just an ordinary working guy. At that point, he was a window cleaner. They were trying to build themselves a bigger house. And they hired this guy to pour a concrete slab for the new house. And the wife took up with this guy or took a fancy to him. And she basically decided she didn’t want the marriage to go. And so she terminated it and said to her husband, I want you to move out you can see the kids anytime you like, and all I want is the better of the two cars. They had two cars, pretty soon, you know, she’s to be seen going around the with the new guy who’s driving the better of the two cars that came from a couple. So I’m not sure how much time passed, but it was Father’s Day. And on Father’s Day. He took the man’s name is Robert Farquharson, and he took his kids out for the day to the nearby town. And on the way back after dark he was bringing them home to their mother. They drove along a certain stretch of road. Besides, there was a very, very deep hole filled with rainwater, was filled to the brim and as his car came down a hill, it swerved across oncoming traffic through the fence and it went into this damn. And it’s at the bottom, he got out and managed to escape the car. But the car, the children in it went to the bottom, and they were drowned. And they were little, they littlest one was only two, right? And the others were, you know, like, going upwards from there. And he hitched a ride back to town. And there were two guys picked him up two young guys. And he was all dripping and covered with slime because he’d been in water and they said, What’s the matter? He said, I have put my car under the dam, and my kids are in it. Take me to my wife, and then say, what are you crazy? Let’s get into the water and try and get the kids out. He said, No, no, it’s too late, take me take me back to town. So those two poor guys who will probably never get over this took him back to town to his wife, and everything developed from there. And he was he wasn’t charged until about three months later, was obviously going to be a difficult case to prove. And so the hearings, there was a trial, he was found guilty. He appealed. He was found, had a second trial was found guilty again, an tried to appeal again tried to go to the High Court, they wouldn’t hear it. So now he only got 33 years and he’s in jail. Now there is one very crucial factor in the trial is trials. In during the first trial, his wife believed in him his wife’s for black and blue, they would not have killed the boys that he loved the boys. And then by the time the second trial comes up, this one around, and she changes her mind. And now he’s a raging figure. She says, Now, I believe that he did do it on purpose. And so that she was so terrifying as a witness. She was such a shocking wage and grief. And it was very hard to see what she suffered in court and what he suffered. It was an enormously painful story, but very, very moving.

It’s interesting to me too, as I was reading how you were struggling with the information that was not just being presented in court. But you were watching the jurors, you were certainly watching, you know, family members in the venue. And you’re interacting with people. I mean, this was a very big case in Australia. And so you’d be out on the street or you’d be with friends. And this is the kind of thing that everyone has an opinion about. And you found yourself occasionally puzzling through how you felt about things, or also feeling like you needed to defend someone whether it could be anyone. I mean, there were times where you felt like a witness had been treated, you know, not well, or had not comported themselves. So I mean, you are watching every single detail, for seven years. Yeah, it’s a really long time. It’s a really long time.

Bear in mind that there will be seven years, there will be one hearing per year, right? A couple of months each year. Right the thing of course, until I’m satisfied, my God, this is never going to end and I’ll be stuck in this story for the rest of while I was very grueling. I desperately wanted him not to be guilty. Because it’s just unbearable to me to think that someone would kill his children. It was suggested in one of the very latest of the hearings, that it might have been a failed suicide attempt that did not come up until right near the very end when he was trying to go to the court. And he was enraged that his counsel put that forward, he was sat there shaking his head, he did not want people to connect him was the idea of suicide. And that interested me greatly that it didn’t come up until right near the end, when they were desperate. I tried too hard on this, but I want the reader to do in this book is to come with me into the court and look at the people as I did and get if I can convey to them the effect of looking at those people had on me about whether he was guilty or not. Or just the kind of swinging this way and that that happens in in a long trial, which is very, I think would be very hard to convey. If I’d written it out with a sort of a God’s eye third person which it never narrowed occurred to, I suppose I should do that because that’s one classic way that people will tell these stories, but I just wanted people to come in there with me and look at it was an out of field with me. I think that’s kind of word in the book judging by what people have said to me about it.

I was really sort of charting my response as I was reading it because again, I didn’t know anything about this case until I started reading the book. I had read The Spare Room, which was another one of your novels that was published in the States, I read The Children’s Bach I had not yet read Monkey Grip, there are a couple of things that carry through your work, regardless of you know, whether we call it fiction or nonfiction or whatever, you are so remarkably honest. And you don’t let your characters get away with anything. But you also you leave some things in, in House of Grief that some of the writers might have taken out or kept to themselves or only shared over the dinner table. And I thought that was really an interesting way of staying in the story, but not taking it over. It never ever became about you. I mean, you quote Janet Malcolm a couple of times in the book, too. And it’s clear that she’s a massive, and it’s been a minute since I’ve read The Journalist and the Murderer, but I’ve, you know, I’ve read it a couple of times. And so seeing sort of her influence on you, and watching you sort of take a step back and say, well, you know, at one point, you felt like you had to defend him to a friend who was like, well, you’re just making excuses. And you’re like, well, actually, the dude has had kind of a terrible life. And he’s not a monster. And yet people are saying, well, he’s a monster. And you just come back and say, Well, it’s because our brains can’t process what he’s done.

Yes, I think that’s true. I think people, some people are angered by the book, you know, how dare you poke your nose into other people’s business in this intimate way? Or actually not? Not many people said that book reviewers, but people who call into radio programs, things like that. One person, at least one person said, I’m not going to read this book, because I know that nowhere in this book, does she say that he’s a monster. And it’s true. I don’t say he’s a monster, because I don’t think he’s a monster. I think he’s a person who, and this is why if he were a monster, I wouldn’t be interested in writing about it. What I’m interested in is people who, who seem to be quite ordinary. And they’re not, you know, psychopaths. And they’re not the murdering type. But that is, but the events of their lives, push them past the thing in themselves, that enables the rest of us to endure our bad fortune. And they push through that or their foot goes through the floor in a moment of crazy feeling. And they do something irreparable. Can never be mended. And that’s what you see, when you go into a court and look at the person in a dock, you see an accused person, you see somebody who is his broken, not someone who’s defiantly sitting there saying, well, she deserved it. You know, it wasn’t. It’s not quite that it’s, it’s a person who’s done the worst thing that you can think of, and who knows what you feel like the next day, when you’ve done something as terrible as that you’ve broken through that thing that most of us remain contained in. I don’t know what it is. But some of you do to endure, endure pain without destroying everything around them.

Watching you wrestle with sort of what’s vengeance, what’s justice? What does fear make people do I mean, this guy was wildly isolated. After his marriage breaks up, it sounds like he was a little isolated and lonely in the marriage too, honestly. And again, none of us is making excuses. I wouldn’t define him as a monster, I would define his behavior as being monstrous.

Yes, committed a monstrous deed, but I don’t think he’s a monster.

I think there are also levels of, we tend to, like grab words really quickly, and just slap a label on because it’s shorthand. And watching people wrestle with language throughout This House of Grief was wild because again, I had moments where I was like, this guy, he absolutely, absolutely without a doubt he did this. This is gross. Like this is he is Kali destroyer of worlds, right? And then I had moments where I thought, well, maybe and then no, I kept coming back to the fact I couldn’t. I really couldn’t get beyond the fact that he had done something terrible. And then then there were all of these sort of weird moments around it. And you I’m not going to spoil the plot points. But I had a very emotional response to the thing that I knew nothing about, I think is what I’m trying to get to. It was, it was interesting. It was really interesting for me reading the book, I have a lot of feelings about this. And I know nothing about these, or this case or anything beyond what you’re telling me on page.

The people that are in the story are the kind of people that will we know, it’s not a sort of weird tribe on the outskirts of civilization that there are new people who go to the supermarket or they tried to build a house or they pour a concrete slab and put your house on it or they go to the supermarket with the children, are you gonna get an ice cream? I mean, it’s the awfulness that one of the questions that I tried to think about was people kept saying, in his defense, but he loved those boys. I thought about that a lot. And I thought, when you love somebody, it goes right into the very darkest part of you into the depths of you that you don’t understand. And there are the drives that are in there in the dark, and love and disappointed love, rejection and love that drives people round the twist, I think to say that because you love someone means you wouldn’t want to kill them seems to me, I mean, in my experience, I’m wanting to kill people I’ve loved quite a lot. And I know, by some good fortune, I’ve never done it. I’ve never picked up a weapon or you know, got that close that what comes out of you under the power of love is it does not mean romantic love just doesn’t kind of touch the sides here. This is love of deep, brutal dark, love, dependency, things that when they’re violated, you can’t answer for what might happen. I think that’s kind of stuff. Freud talks about life and found that useful.

That was one of the things I definitely sort of every time someone either in Farquharson’s family or, you know, your reporting turned up moments where people would say, oh, no, he loved him that that people justify a lot of things for fluff. So that really, that argument just has never carried weight with me. It just absolutely never had water. Yeah, yeah. And it was wild to me how heavily people leaned on that from multiple points of view wasn’t just, you know, and I kept thinking, we step back for two seconds, really step back for two seconds. That is an extraordinary thing to say that, you know, children were murdered at the hands of a parent who love them unconditionally. It’s like, well, actually,

That’s hard for us to hear. I mean, these are the realizations, aren’t they, about humans and, and what we’re like and what we’re capable of, and how it seemed to me that there’s this darkness exists in all of us. And many of us, it doesn’t come out what life hands us doesn’t cause all our systems to kind of break down. Right. I think there’s some people who, who suffer in ways that make them commit appalling crimes. And they have to go to jail. I mean, it kind of people like that all around the street.

Yeah. It started in this particular case too I mean, and you’ve talked about this in other interviews about your work in general, but knowing that the family is sort of the place where everything starts. So I want to come back to this. And I know, I mentioned it earlier in the show, but this idea that somehow if you’re writing about a domestic scene, it can’t be epic, and it can’t be ambitious. And it’s just like, well, here’s a pile of dirty dishes. And, you know, we’re just going to, you know, follow along, as someone quietly has a nervous breakdown, that that that when in fact, actually it is kind of the story of the world, right? Like it just happens, that we’re in a kitchen. And there’s this idea that women only write these tiny, tiny books.

I know, that’s what people said to me for ages. Small canvas, they used to say so your books, a small canvas, and when you were talking just now, I suddenly remembered a scene in a fantastic British TV movie I saw recently, I think it was called Marriage. Anyway, it was the actress Nicola Walker, and she thinks her father was dependent on her in an enraging way. And imminent, which was like in real time, where you see him standing by the fridge, commanding, demanding, waiting for her to make him a sandwich. The film follows the making of the sandwich, every detail, she goes to the fridge gets stuck, it gets the bread out of the pack, it’s all in one shot, makes the sandwich and the whole time she’s making the sandwich you’re thinking she’s always screaming with repressed rage. And it goes into, she doesn’t make it brutal, but something about the making of the sandwich. It’s almost like it’s a poison sandwich. But it’s the most astonishing scene. I’ve watched it with my mouth hanging over and I thought they doing it doing this in real time. It’s unbearable.

I mean, again, this this idea that, you know, a guy like Farquharson just is suddenly emerges out of nowhere. And I’m not saying that his family is necessarily responsible. I’m simply saying that we can’t ignore that he came from some place. He came from something, you know, he didn’t just walk out of the woods and suddenly be a person and this is not. And if we’re not looking at these pieces, right, and the jurors, they all have families, the judges, the lawyers. You have family like, the idea that somehow this person can act independently of everything in the world around him. It’s a little bit of a fairy tale to say that there isn’t, you know, all of these different pieces, you know, it’s ultimately the end of his family unity, as he knows that the wife and the three boys that makes him do something unspeakable.

Well, there is a thing that runs through the book, where I say a theme, a series of events. After, after the marriage break up, he goes to see a therapist because I mean, a country bloke in Australia, and they’re the hardest people in the world to get to go and talk to someone. And that man gave evidence in court when he spoke about how Farquharson behaved and universal things that they said to each other. And I was sort of stunned by the shallowness of the conversations that he reported. Okay, so he says, psychologist in the bush and somehow nobody, nobody perceived the depth to which Robert Farquharson was feeling this breakdown. You know, nobody seemed to be aware that that he was building up this terrible head of steam. It didn’t occur to anybody, or wouldn’t I suppose, and yet people suffer, suffer so much, and in their family torment, or just kept, kept thinking, why couldn’t this guy have you? Does imagination bit more while dealing with this sad guy? They was asking the people who are saying to me, you’re taking your medication? Are you taking your medication, or quantum that haven’t been? Some tapes were played in the court, they bumped his phone, because it was such a strange case, they had to get some tried to get evidence from what he was saying to other people. And again, and again, you’d hear that and you’d hear there was a friend or a relative or bring up and see how he was and they’d always start by saying, Are you taking your medication? That would be the first question they ask him, people cling to that idea of medicating our pain.

There’s an idea of masculinity that goes certainly with an Australian stereotype to a certain extent. And if you’re caught up in that, and if you’re defining yourself in those terms, right, and not even not even necessarily consciously defining yourself in those terms, and yet, you know, your wife throws you out. And what does that mean for you as a man? Right? Many men are not great about talking about their feelings anyway. So you’re talking about this doctor? And I’m like, I can imagine these two dudes sitting in a room, not really having a good go, that trying to get each other to talk, I realize is the doctor’s job. But at the same time, like, how do you get someone to talk who doesn’t want to talk? Or doesn’t think there’s a problem or doesn’t think he’s the problem, you can sort of see the circles?

Yeah, that side of the story just very painful to me, I feel so sad for everybody. It’s a terribly painful story. You as you say, he was lonely. There were so many details in the story, where his loneliness as these loneliness between when his wife broke up the marriage, and then when he drove into the dam, just, I mean, all these hints given that he was actually thinking of driving into a truck. I mean, he actually told one of his friends that and his friend said oh bullshit, mate, you know, you don’t do something like that. I mean, that people don’t dare to go into each other’s darkness.

You’ve told other people too, that by the time everything was over, as you said, you needed to wait until all of the appeals played out, and everything you needed as much of the material before you could sit down to write. And certainly, if you’re writing something as a trial is going on, I mean, it becomes a very different book. But you’ve also described yourself as being traumatized at the end of it as you sat down to write. And I’m wondering if you would be willing to talk about that a little bit. I mean, we’ve hinted at some of the material it is very dark material, but it wasn’t just the material that you were having a response to.

Well, all throughout the trial, I did, I was writing. I’d write something every day after the hearing, each hearing. So I had a lot of material to work with, by the time I’d got to the end and have to start writing but then I see I live with, next door to my daughter and her family and her husband and their three kids and the kids were quite small at the time. The two there were two of them who were little boys and you know there were at the age where they like to come sit on my knee, and I’d get home from the court stark with horror, I’ve been listening to and they’ve run to me and want to cuddle me and sit on the couch and sit on my knee I knew that was it to some of the I took two of the dead boys and I, I sort of felt that I would contaminate them. It wasn’t we kind of superstitious feeling as if the horror of the court would kind of stick to me on the way home and come off on them. And I didn’t I mean, obviously, it didn’t. But that’s what I mean by traumatize that you carry that, like that around and I sit with the journalists sometimes, and I might, they’ve got a kind of toughness that I hadn’t got, because I’m not never trained. I’ve never been in the newsroom, I’ve never been a real journalist, I didn’t have to come up with anything written. I mean, they had to go away into each day and, and find some copy, but that I just could like, hang on for seven years, and the whole thing festering away, but the end, I ran into one of those journalists I hadn’t seen since the trial, or ran into him. And I thought, oh, this film, and I just went say, Hello. And he waved, and I thought that would be the end of it. But he came running towards me. And he plopped down in the seat next to me and said, how did you pull up after the focus and trial? And I suddenly thought, Oh, my God, he this is like two years later. And I thought, Oh, I don’t think I pulled up all that. Well, that was when he asked me the question that I started thinking about it. And I said, Oh, no, not so good. How about you, and he just blurted out that he’d had a kind of crack up and had a had to leave his job. And that was when he kind of admitted that to me, or told it to me that I, I realized that we were all freaked out by it by the just the horror story in the pipe. So it was a relief to me that he said that, and I probably would have never even confessed it tonight. If he hadn’t told me that.

That’s really interesting to hear you say, you might not have thought about it, if someone hadn’t asked you, because I’ve been having read the book, it’s clear you’re struggling, it’s clear that you are wrestling with things for like, I can’t even believe. And this is the thing that I do appreciate you as the narrator of this book, where you’re saying, I can’t even believe I’m thinking about this. I can’t even believe that I’m worried about XY or Z. And again, I’m just staying away from spoilers. But there were some moments where my eyes got really big. And I was like, Oh, she left that in. Okay. I’m not sure I would have been as generous. I don’t know if that’s because I was raised in Boston, we tend to stand on hills and smite people. That’s what we do for fun, I get a little judgy about people who make bad decisions. And I’m not making light of the story at all. It’s just I’m making light of myself as a reader. And because you know, you put your work out into the world and reader brings half of the book, you know, whatever their experiences. So watching you be willing to play this out on the page was really, it was fascinating. It was really fascinating, and a really sort of satisfying reading experience for me. And again, it’s not, it’s not a case I knew anything about I know very little about the Australian court system. But I recognize the characters, I recognize you, as a narrator, I recognize the families, the members, the families, the various people who roll through this book, the same way that I can recognize the characters in the children’s back and monkey grip. I recognize them for being their own people and having their own impressions of the world and making their own decisions. And you do it with dialogue. And you do it with these details. You just get these details that go from being very specific. To wildly universal, in the span of very few words.

On Yeah. Oh, thank you. I want to write in such a way that there’s room for the reader to come in. Yeah, that’s partly why I try and enhance as do it in as few words as possible. I don’t want to write passages of with lots of flourishes and opinions. And I just want to make room for the reader to come in and feel things on their own account. So I’m glad characters words like that. I suppose they are pretty sort of archetypal, on play. I mean, when you’re talking about a family, you’ve got a lot of archetypes moving around.

They’re archetypal. Yes, but more just fully human to me. I will say this to you. The ending felt inevitable to me. And it still felt slightly surprising even though because I think and I think I it was maybe just me thinking oh, and actually when we turn off the recording, I’m going to tell you exactly what I’m referring to. I was sad. I was sad at that person’s decision.

No one could say it had a happy ending. But I don’t see it as a happy ending. I see it as over inclusion. But an older, writer who I admired and liked very much, Jessica Anderson. She said to me just casually one day that she thought that it was a conservative book, she said, and she said, women write tend to write a conservative when their daughter is a teenager. That’s interesting. Went and kind of checked if other people had done it, that was an interesting remark.

It’s an interesting remark, we are going to let that hang in the air though. So people can think about it and then go read the children’s book. I don’t need happy endings. It did feel like a resolution. But it also felt very true to the characters and the story and what they were wrestling with. It was a good experience for me as a reader to have these books in tandem. I think some folks may gravitate towards one or the other simply because they said, Well, I read nonfiction. I read fiction. I am hoping people come to both. I do think you can see a through line of you. Characters everything for you. I feel. I mean, it’s sort of like you love lovely sentences, too. But you need the character to sort of grab on to and then the lovely sentences come where some writers are just like, No, no, I need the lovely sentences first, and then we can figure out the rest of it. And I just I think you need the people first, whether they’re sitting in front of you, or you’re sort of conjuring, well, fingers crossed, that we get people to pick them both up. Because I think I think as a pair I think they work.

I am very pleasantly surprised to see that they do work as a pair. I wouldn’t think that they would. So this has been very interesting for me. Thank you.

Good. I’m glad to hear. Helen Garner, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. Both The Children’s Bach and This House of Grief are out now. And Monkey Grip comes in early 2024. And they have a really fantastic sort of look across the three of them. I’m so pleased. Thank you again. This was great. Thank you