Helen Garner
Auteur de The Spare Room
A propos de l'auteur
Helen Garner was born on November 7, 1942 in Geelong, Australia. She received a bachelor's degree with majors in English and French from the University of Melbourne. Throughout her career, she has written both fiction and non-fiction. Her first novel, Monkey Grip, was published in 1977. Her afficher plus non-fiction books include The First Stone, Joe Cinque's Consolation, The Feel of Steel, True Stories and Everywhere I Look. She has also written for film and theatre. She has won numerous awards for her work including Victorian Premier's Literary Awards, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction for The Spare Room, For the This House of Grief, she won the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Barbara Jefferis Award, and the Ned Kelly Award in 2015, and in 2016, the WA Premier's Book Award for nonfiction. She was one of three winners of the 2016 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. Everywhere I Look won the 2017 Indie Book Award for Nonfiction. (Bowker Author Biography) afficher moins
Crédit image: Helen Garner at Adelaide Writer's Week By Michael Coghlan - https://www.flickr.com/photos/mikecogh/16642539190/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=62681310
Œuvres de Helen Garner
Silent Death 1 exemplaire
Bush Studies: Text Classics 1 exemplaire
Honour & Other People’s Children: Text Classics 1 exemplaire
The New Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1950 1 exemplaire
The Last Days of Chez Nous [1992 film] — Screenwriter — 1 exemplaire
Oeuvres associées
Lost Classics: Writers on Books Loved and Lost, Overlooked, Under-read, Unavailable, Stolen, Extinct, or Otherwise Out… (2000) — Contributeur — 300 exemplaires
In Another Part of the Forest: An Anthology of Gay Short Fiction (1994) — Contributeur — 174 exemplaires
Australian Literature: An Anthology of Writing from the Land Down Under (1993) — Contributeur — 26 exemplaires
Goodbye to Romance: Stories by New Zealand and Australian Women Writers, 1930-1988 (1989) — Contributeur — 10 exemplaires
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Garner, Helen
- Date de naissance
- 1942-11-07
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- Australia
- Lieu de naissance
- Geelong, Victoria, Australia
- Lieux de résidence
- Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Sydney, New South Wales, Australia - Études
- University of Melbourne (BA - English and French)
- Professions
- screenwriter
journalist
teacher (high school)
novelist
short-story writer - Relations
- Garner, Alice (daughter)
- Prix et distinctions
- Windham–Campbell Literature Prize (2016)
Membres
Critiques
Listes
A Novel Cure (2)
Prix et récompenses
Vous aimerez peut-être aussi
Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 35
- Aussi par
- 17
- Membres
- 4,063
- Popularité
- #6,195
- Évaluation
- 3.9
- Critiques
- 183
- ISBN
- 223
- Langues
- 11
- Favoris
- 17
from Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
I was totally inoculated from the social turbulence of the 1970s, married to a seminary student and then pastor, completing my education while working ten or twenty hours a week in church youth programs. I didn’t even drink until I was twenty-eight and had a glass of wine. No sexual liberation or experimentation with drugs for me.
A college professor told our class that he predicted a new Victorian Age was going to come after this age of freedom, that the pendulum always swings back and forth. He was surely correct. For the Seventies also saw the birth of evangelical Christianity, and I knew people who only listened to the Christian radio stations and shopped with Christian businesses.
Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, drawn from her diary entries, illuminates the Seventies counterculture world of sexual freedom, women’s liberation, and drugs. Her Nora is compelled to break from the old paradigm where women used their wiles to snag a husband. She sleeps with numerous men, giving or responding to casual invitations. And yet she and her female friends struggle with jealousy and desire a deep bond with the men they love.
Nora loves Javo, an actor who becomes addicted to cocaine. Even when drugs ruin his looks and comes between them, she can’t find the same connection with other men. Javo leaves and returns. He bonds and closes off. He steals and returns to be healed. Nora can’t sever her feelings for him.
Nora has a daughter who sees and knows too much, who Nora loves but will happily send off with acquaintances for a bit of freedom. Every time Gracie sees Javo with a needle, she cries out a warning, a child too wise for her age. It is shattering.
The women in the story share camaraderie, even when sharing lovers, clucking at the feckless men while acknowledging their necessity to their happiness. Nora sweeps and prepares food, ministers to Javo when he is withdrawing or ill. In many ways, she is still stuck in the traditional role of wife and helpmate, her freedom limited, while Javo and the other men come and go and take without commitment.
Nora tells her story with directness, without sentiment. Characters float in and out, often without context and without back story. Her bohemian lifestyle does not bring joy, but loneliness.
The air is deep, deep blue, one star. I feel a hot day coming when this night is over. I’m full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly–my head is racing wit ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I’m left out.
from Monkey Grip by Helen Garner
As foreign as Nora’s life is to me, as a character I relate to her. Her searching, her desire for connection, for meaning. Her addiction to love and her need for autonomy. Social mores and conventions flux and flow, but human nature remains the same.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book.… (plus d'informations)