I started with [a:Helen Garner|332165|Helen Garner|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1332565089p2/332165.jpg] [b:Everywhere I Look|28818628|Everywhere I Look|Helen Garner|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1455172355l/28818628._SY75_.jpg|49036034] and read Claire Fuller's review which is hard to top. https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3253836375?book_show_action=false&from... I was also reminded of the plot of the [a:Sigrid Nunez|6633|Sigrid Nunez|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1529285691p2/6633.jpg] [b:What Are You Going Through|51152434|What Are You Going Through|Sigrid Nunez|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1585361945l/51152434._SY75_.jpg|74855144] about friendships under strain. Engrossing story and a refreshing Australian setting. ( )

I felt the raw and conflicting emotions as if I was Helen. The ending sentences are so sparse but heavy with the finality of saying goodbye. I also felt the description of being close but not the closest friend was deftly conveyed. ( )

amazing grace - see Diana Athill's blurb
also see Oct 2023 article NYr by Helen Sullivan who interviewed Garner in Melbourne ( )

One of the most emotionally true stories I've read about illness, caregiving, and friendship. #aww2013 ( )

A woman cares for her friend as she is dying and denying that she is dying from cancer. ( )

I picked this up at 2:30 and finished it by 7:00 the same day. I thought it was extraordinary. It is the story of two 60-something friends, Helen and Nicola. Nicola who has advanced cancer asks Helen if she can come and stay with her in Melbourne while she undergoes a three-week experimental, shysterish treatment. Both women were and are bohemians, although Nicola is the one more entranced by alternative-whatever.
It is amazing the economy, in under 200 pages, with which Garner deals with a number of minor characters and a tightly composed plot that manages to touch on a variety of topics including friendship, death, medicine, family. What stood out to me most was the conflict between carer Helen and patient Nicola: the denial, the fear and anger, the urge to do the right thing versus the things that are not clearly in Nicola’s best interest, the ambiguities threaded throughout.
The book is sad and funny. It did remind me of my mother’s death and the conflict, denial, love, fear, helplessness it entailed. I still don’t understand it but the novel treats of these very issues. Both main characters were appealing and their bond believable. Very well written with more obscure Australia-isms than I knew existed—tinnie, dobbing, manchester, doona, being a few. ( )

Helen accepts Nicola into her home, while Nicola undergoes treatment for her cancer. Helen finds that the treatment is questionable, but Nicola is set on continuing. The relationship between the two women grows strained, and Helen struggles to care for her friend. This book explores the emotions and ethics surrounding a patient and their care, when the choices made by the patient impact their friends and family. ( )

A fine, short, cleansing book, kind of like having a coffee enema. There's nothing complicated going on here, unless you think writing about emotions is complicated: the set up is designed to tug at your heart strings, and it does, and it does so through easy to read prose. Only if you think friendship is easy and people are always good will anything here surprise you. But I suppose some people do think that.

The plot is straightforward: an irritating ex-hippy has cancer, refuses to accept that she's going to die, imposes herself on our narrator Helen, is unpleasant. Helen, too, is unpleasant. There are coffee enemas. There is plenty for people my age to point at as evidence for the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of people roughly Helen Garner's age (i.e., "the sixties might have ruined the fifties, which is nice, but they also ruined what was left of the twentieth century, thanks for that.")

The novel's conclusion is a bit ham-fisted. Rather than leave us to deduce the ex-hippy's death, we get a terrible "As I sat there, I did not know that such and such would happen etc etc... death" chapter, which rather undermines the wonderful economy and restraint of the first 170 (very sparsely type-set) pages.

Well, this sounds harsher than it's meant to. There's nothing wrong with a well-written book that you can read in a day, that won't buy into the silliness of 'alternative therapies,' and doesn't try to BS you in any way about people, death, or cancer. ( )

Für drei Wochen will Nicola bei ihrer Freundin in Melbourne wohnen, um sich einer alternativen Krebstherapie zu unterziehen; das Zimmer steht bereit. Doch Helen trifft es völlig unvorbereitet - wie desolat Nicolas Zustand ist, wie kräftezehrend ihre Pflege, wie barbarisch die Bedingungen jener obskuren Therapie, wie wundergläubig ihre todkranke Freundin und vor allem, mit welch hilflosem, unbändigem Zorn sie selbst auf all dies reagiert. Mit entwaffnender Wahrhaftigkeit beschreibt Helen Garner diese unerträgliche Situation, in der Freundschaft, Verantwortung, ja ein Leben auf dem Spiel stehen. Doch sie setzt der Verzweiflung ein Maß an kluger Menschlichkeit und beherztem Witz entgegen, die Das Zimmer zu einer bewegenden und tröstlichen, auf wunderbare Weise heilsamen Lektüre machen.

I liked many parts of this, however, it really does read like nonfiction (as Garner has been accused of), it has a message, and anything outside of that message is terribly contracted. ( )

A friend, dying of cancer, comes to stay. That's no easy topic to write about, and when the friend is simply a pushover for any 'alternative' treatments the scene is set for a struggle.

Cry, laugh - yes, laugh - and enjoy this sensitively handled look at death, friends dying, cancer and hope. ( )

This is a short but thought-provoking novel. If you were sick, would you impose on a friend to care for you? If you're that friend, how much inconvenience are you willing to accept to take care of that person? What do you do when they seem ungrateful or when they don't see the toll that caring for them is taking on you? ( )

A beautiful articulation of an emotionally harrowing experience. I devoured it. Full review to come. ( )

I dashed throught this succinct, moving, bitter-sweet story of sharing a ahouse with a dying friend. I cherished the insights and gasped at some of the piercing truths. Garner is as ever wonderful. ( )

This was a strange book that I couldn't really wrap my head around. What was it? Was it pain at looking after a friend who was dying, or pain that she was dying? ( )

On finishing this novel I had to go check on a few details. Yes it's classified as fiction and yes, it mirrors events in the author's own life. This story packs quite a punch and has a very direct, very real style of delivery. Surprisingly it's not about the sick person here, the story is all about the gut wrenching, emotional roller-coaster ride that a carer goes through, when nursing a terminally ill friend. As I turned the last page, I closed the book slowly, stared out the window and thought quiet thoughts! ( )

Helen Garner's award winning novel The Spare Room is an unflinching and at times brutally honest and unsparing exploration of a loving friendship between two women of late middle age. Nicola has journeyed from Sydney to Melbourne to stay with Helen while receiving a 3-week course of treatment for advanced cancer. Helen, anticipating Nicola's visit with a mix of anxiety and dread, has prepared the spare room in her house for her dear friend. Nicola arrives a wreck, and immediately Helen fears Nicola is at death's door. But the sick woman rallies and regains energy and her good spirits in what becomes--during the next several weeks--an agonizing pattern of euphoric highs, miserable lows and sleepless nights that grinds Helen down until she can take no more. Nicola's alternative treatments, dispensed at an independent clinic in the city, are expensive, controversial and based on a kind of science that, as Helen digs deeper into it, begins to seem not just dubious but downright fraudulent. As Helen watches her friend's suffering intensify she grows impatient, first with the treatments and then the clinic, and finally with Nicola herself, whose relentless optimism and cheerful stoicism start grating on her nerves. The rage that bubbles to the surface of Helen's normally staid and pragmatic demeanor shocks her with its raw intensity. She doesn’t want to argue and has no wish to betray her friend by cruelly destroying her faint hopes of recovery, but after two weeks she can no longer endure Nicola’s breezy insistence that the treatments are working and that she’s going to get better. Garner’s narrative is engrossing but sometimes painful to read. In this book we confront one of the most deeply ingrained of human fears. What are we to do when someone we love is dying, but won’t face up to it? Under such dire circumstances, with the inevitable outcome looming, how important is the truth? In the end, Helen and Nicola work out a compromise based on their own selfish needs. Helen Garner is an unsentimental writer who cuts through the crap like few others, dissecting human motivation with surgical precision: like a scalpel, her writing is sharp and effective. The Spare Room is a potent story that acknowledges the inevitability of death, while also acknowledging that, for the person approaching the end of life, acceptance and defiance both serve a purpose. ( )

Short, sparse, and rooted in personal experience, this novel packs a serious punch while confronting one of society's biggest taboos - slow, but sure, death.

The narrator, who could, perhaps, be mistaken for Garner herself, takes in an old friend who is visiting for a radical treatment of her terminal cancer. The book uses this fulcrum to examine different attitudes towards death, caring, friendship, and nature - never shying away from the shit, literal and metaphorical, involved in slowly dying.

Sad, and uplifting without ever drifting into an easy sentimentality.

( )

This is a spare and unsparing book. At 175 pages with wide margins and large type, it is scarcely more than a novella and covers a span of only three weeks. But it packs a wallop.

As the story opens Helen, the narrator, is awaiting the arrival of her friend Nicola, a proud, independent, somewhat imperious older woman who is coming to Melbourne, Australia to stay in Helen's spare room. Nicola, suffering from stage four cancer, has come to undergo three weeks of cancer treatment at an alternative clinic. Helen is initially pleased to be able to help her glamorous, free-spirited friend, but that soon changes. Nicola turns a blind eye to the obvious quackery of the treatment, and downplays its horrible side effects, confident that it is driving out her disease. Helen, exhausted from nursing a friend who cannot acknowledge that she needs help, grows increasingly angry and frustrated.

Garner's narrator Helen struggles with agonizing choices. Does she take hope away from Nicola in order to spare her the pain of useless treatments? Is it cruel or kind to force her friend to face her mortality? And to what degree is her own fear of death fueling her anger? Garner unflinchingly tackles all these hard questions and offers no easy answers. She has said that this story is a fictionalized version based on the illness and death of her friend Jenya Osborne, and perhaps that's why its brutal honesty and powerful empathy both leap off the page. This is a book that's hard to read and even harder to stop reading.

I don't award 5 stars very often, but this book deserves it. It was one of those where I savoured every page yet could hardly bear to turn them, knowing it was one step closer to the end. I aspire to observe and describe people with the same skill as Garner. Will definitely be seeking out her others. ( )

A really interesting book. I thought at first that it was a memoir but it isn't. The characters are all really believable and the story is touching. ( )

A tough subject beautifully treated with strong, sensitive writing. ( )

An incredible book which is full of truth, love and grief. But it's never tolling and always comforting. Helen Garner is a joy to read. ( )

Helen prepara con esmero el cuarto de invitados a la espera de la llegada de su vieja amiga Nicola, tan bohemia e independiente como ella. Nicola va a quedarse tres semanas para someterse a un tratamiento de medicina alternativa, aunque muy pronto se hace evidente que se encuentra más enferma de lo que ella misma está dispuesta a aceptar. Por su parte, Helen, convertida en enfermera, ángel de la guarda y juez, apenas puede disimular su disgusto por la extravagante cura en la que su amiga confía ciegamente. El desacuerdo entre ambas no sólo genera una inesperada brecha en su amistad, sino que las mueve a reflexionar hasta qué punto están dispuestas a sacrificar los intereses propios por ayudar a otra persona, poniendo en peligro un estilo de vida al que no desean renunciar. ( )

El carácter autobiográfico de esta hermosa y emocionante exploración del ser más profundo queda evidente en las características de su personaje principal, Helen, una escritora de edad madura y arquetipo de la mujer moderna y emancipada. Helen prepara con esmero el cuarto de invitados a la espera de la llegada de su vieja amiga Nicola, tan bohemia e independiente como ella. Nicola va a quedarse tres semanas para someterse a un tratamiento de medicina alternativa, aunque muy pronto se hace evidente que se encuentra más enferma de lo que ella misma está dispuesta a aceptar. Por su parte, Helen, convertida en enfermera, ángel de la guarda y juez, apenas puede disimular su disgusto por la extravagante cura en la que su amiga confía ciegamente. El desacuerdo entre ambas no sólo genera una inesperada brecha en su amistad, sino que las mueve a reflexionar hasta qué punto están dispuestas a sacrificar los intereses propios por ayudar a otra persona, poniendo en peligro un estilo de vida al que no desean renunciar. ( )