Garner’s early work earned her a reputation as a feminist; she has described all her books as “the story of fighting with my father, and of course, by extension, fighting all others who represent the father-figure to me, like big institutions, powerful men, expert knowledge and theory and all those sorts of things.” Then, in 1992, two students at the University of Melbourne went to the police to accuse the master of Ormond College, Alan Gregory, of groping them at a party. (Gregory denied the claims and was ultimately cleared of sexual-assault charges in court.) Garner read about the case and found herself sympathizing, at least initially, with Gregory. “He touched her breast and she went to the cops?” Garner recalls asking friends. She wrote Gregory a letter, telling him that it was “heartbreaking, for a feminist of nearly fifty like me, to see our ideals of so many years distorted into this ghastly punitiveness.”
That letter is included the book that Garner went on to write about the case, “The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power.” It was published in Australia in 1995 and in the U.S. two years later. Gregory photocopied Garner’s letter and showed it to people; the young women who made the accusations against him read the letter and refused to talk to her. As Janet Malcolm, one of Garner’s heroes, wrote in a review of the book, for this magazine, Garner “did what a journalist must never do—she showed her hand too early.” But Garner told me that the young women’s refusal hardened her determination to write the book. Later, they tried to stop it from being published, threatening to take Garner to court and applying, unsuccessfully, for access to her notes, transcripts, drafts, and diaries. (The book’s first run was pulped ahead of publication after a journalist pointed out a moment where readers might be able to identify the complainants, who, along with Gregory, are given pseudonyms in the book.) “The First Stone” divided critics and was lambasted by academics. It also sold as briskly as “Monkey Grip” had. But, when I asked Lisa Lucas, the publisher at Pantheon who bought Garner’s back catalogue, about the book, she said she hadn’t read it: it wasn’t part of the submission, she said, and Pantheon didn’t buy it.
Garner agreed to pay a visit with me to Ormond College, where she hadn’t been since she wrote the book, thirty years earlier. The campus is dominated by turreted neo-Gothic buildings surrounded by pathways lined with flowers and small trees. We arrived to find a locked security gate; Garner began to turn around, but a student happened to be leaving just at that moment and let us in. “This place gives me the creeps,” Garner said, as we entered. We kept coming to dead ends and turning back. “See, I always think I’ll get stuck,” she said.
I asked Garner whether she might have reached different conclusions if the accusers had spoken to her. “Quite possibly,” she said. “I might not have even written the book.” In the past few years, she told me, she has thought about how she hasn’t really had a job since 1972. “And I really had no experience of the way that women get treated in institutions. I have no experience of an institutional working life.” As we walked around the campus, she described the vitriolic reactions the book generated, which surprised her. “You really can’t imagine the shit I got for that book,” she said. “It was very, very bad.”
It wasn’t just Garner who got shit for the book: when it was first published, Alice told me, strangers used to approach her to argue about her mother’s opinions. These days, she said, women come up to her saying how much they love her mother’s work. “Sometimes it’s annoying,” she added, laughing. Garner’s sister Linda, a retired nurse and hospital chaplain, told me that her sister came up in a reading group of hers recently, and one of the women said, “I think what Helen doesn’t realize is that we’re not all as brave as she is.” (I asked Linda if she’d read the diaries; she said she stopped after the first volume. “What’s hard about the diaries,” she said, “is that I feel it would be possible to drown in Helen’s memories. It’s taken me a long time to give authority to my own memories of growing up.”)
We didn’t stay at Ormond long—we were in and out in about ten minutes. It was enough. “I can’t tell you how sick I felt being there,” Garner said as we climbed back into her car.
Later that day, Garner told me that she has looked back on the period after she was fired from Fitzroy High, and was desperate for a job, and has wondered, “partly as a fantasy, partly as a joke,” why she didn’t become a cop. She admires the “unshockability” of good police officers, she said. Although her writing exhibits a high degree of control, the Helen Garner we meet in her nonfiction is not unruffled; she tends to expose herself as fully as possible to the most difficult emotions in a story. In 1999, Garner began following the case of two women, Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao, who were accused of murdering a man named Joe Cinque, Singh’s boyfriend, after Singh injected him with a lethal dose of heroin. Singh’s defense was one of “diminished responsibility,” on account of mental illness; she was convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder, and eventually served just four years of a ten-year sentence. Rao was acquitted of all charges. Having seen Cinque’s mother, Maria, at court, Garner spent time with her, trying to comprehend her overwhelming grief, then wrote a book, “Joe Cinque’s Consolation,” that is largely about the inadequacy of the justice system. Cinque’s death “billowed like a dark curtain on every breeze that blew,” Garner wrote in her journal at the time, according to her biographer, Bernadette Brennan. “It seeped into everything I did.”
In Australia, most trials are open to the public. I suggested to Garner that we go to one together. She wrote me an e-mail that night: “I checked the Supreme Court lists for tomorrow, and there’s a part-heard trial of a guy called Hudson Martin who’s accused of having killed a grandfather with a baseball bat in a Christmas Day brawl. Woman judge.” The next day, after having sandwiches near the courthouse, we made our way through security, past the court library—where, Garner said, she used to “feast on judgments”—and into the courtroom, decorated with cornices molded into seashells and flowers. We took our seats. “Before the lunch break,” the prosecutor began, “you told us that you heard a massive bang.” We were off.
The accused sat at the back, his hands clasped on the table before him. He had short hair and wore a tidy suit. His barrister maintained that he’d swung the bat in self-defense. The prosecutor called one of his friends to the stand and asked several questions about a young woman named Chloe; he and the others had been drinking at her house before the alleged crime. “I don’t know what you want me to say,” the friend kept repeating. Garner quietly took my notebook and pen. “He’s the most hopeless, helpless witness I’ve EVER SEEN,” she wrote.
When court adjourned, we rushed to Queensmith, a small, hip bar nearby. Garner wanted to know more about Chloe; I wanted to know whether the friend was protecting Martin out of love or fear. (Martin was found not guilty.) Garner seemed pleased by my interest. In “This House of Grief,” Garner also attends a trial with a companion—a friend’s daughter, Louise, then sixteen and on a gap year. A man named Robert Farquharson had been charged with drowning his three sons, ages ten, seven, and two, by driving his sedan into a dam; the presence of Louise alternately highlights and relieves the mournfulness of the book. (Farquharson was convicted.) Garner is candid about her emotions, analyzing them with a degree of remove which allows her to illustrate, with an unsparing empathy, how irrational we all can be, and how little we understand of our own behavior, let alone that of those around us.
Early on our second day together, Garner told me a scandalous story about a writer she knew well. It was somewhat shocking, and would be, I quickly realized, almost impossible to confirm. My notebook and recording device were on the table; this was clearly on the record. But, as she spoke, I wondered whether she was telling it on purpose.
Two days later, Garner suggested that we drive out to her sister Linda’s small house in the Victorian countryside, Primrose Gully, roughly two hours away. This would make going to Garner’s own house out of the question—she had hinted the previous afternoon that it might be possible after all, because none of her family would be there—but I had one more day, and decided not to mention it. Before we left, Garner brought up what she came to call the Terrible Story.
“Listen, I don’t want you to put anything about that in the article,” she said. I told her that I was unlikely to—I wasn’t sure it was relevant—but that I couldn’t agree not to. We then climbed into her car for what now risked being a tense two-hour drive. Worse, it was a public holiday, and we were soon stuck in standstill traffic as others fled the city. “Look,” Garner said, “we can go past my house, and go to the toilet. You can see my toilet,” she added, laughing.
The grass outside the house was soft with clover and miniature white daisies, her small front yard covered with the large leaves of violet plants not yet in bloom. The kitchen was slightly messy, and on her dining table was a copy of The New York Review of Books, open to a review of Jacqueline Rose’s “On Violence and on Violence Against Women,” with bits underlined in pen. (“Boys and men are taught that masculinity means an absurd omnipotence, mastery, comfort, and prowess. They fail—how could they not?—to live up to that ideal.”) Also on the table were pale-yellow daffodils, dark-yellow nasturtiums, and the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. The giant book’s cover creaked as I opened it, and inside was a note: it had been given to Garner by housemates on Falconer Street, in 1974, the year before she started “Monkey Grip.”
Garner took me out to the back yard, walked up to the chicken coop, and sweetly greeted the chickens. She let them out and gave them water and some weeds. We had lunch, then got into the car and drove until we reached wide-open plains, fields of bright-yellow rapeseed. We talked about Australian roadkill, of which, unusually, there had been none so far. “The wallabies are the saddest, because they always look like they are holding a little handbag,” Garner said.
