Ramona Koval interviews Helen Garner about 'True Stories'

Ramona Koval talks to Helen Garner about True Stories, a collection of her non-fiction work over twenty-five years. Ramona Koval: I would like to begin by talking about the differences between writing fiction and non-fiction. You write about birth and youth, sex, illness, death, sisters ... the big things in life. How does that differ for writing fiction and non-fiction, if at all? Helen Garner: I find that the subjects for non-fiction that I write about seem to present themselves from outside myself, whereas the fictional ones are much more some little thing that’s been worming away at me that I’ve become conscious of. The fiction kind of worms its way out and the non-fiction worms its way in, I suppose you could say it that way. RK: Do you believe in synchronicity and the way the universe presents you with something from the outside which responds to something that’s worming its way in? HG: Yeah, I do. I feel as if, for me, fiction and non-fiction aren’t really all that far apart. The fiction that I write often starts off very close to things that have really happened, or people that really exist. There are certain fictional techniques that you can bring to bear on non-fiction, but you do have to stick as close as you can to what’s known as reality. RK: And what about the writing process? Are you aware of deadlines and length when you’re writing non-fiction? Does that shape the kind of words that you come out with? HG: Possibly. The deadline thing seems slightly less important than the length thing. I do feel a great constraint of length writing for newspapers particularly, but magazines too, because there aren’t really publications in Australia that will let you write at length. Sometimes when I read those old-fashioned pieces that used to be in the New Yorker, where people rolled on endlessly about Bali, I think perhaps that they were allowed to go on a little bit too long, some of them. But it does seem a shame that there aren’t places here where you can run a really extensive piece and still get a mass readership, if that’s what you’re after. RK: It is a pity that venues for this kind of ‘literary journalism’ are few and far between – the kind of outlet that will allow you to work for weeks or months on a story and then write and re-write it so it actually lives forever, perhaps. HG: Yes, well I think it’s partly a matter of money. I mean who’s got the money to pay you? After The First Stone came out I got various offers from various newspapers to come onto their staff, but I didn’t want to do that because they wanted me to write them X number of pieces a year. I don’t want to work that way. One of the luxuries I’ve got is that I don’t have to write about anything, except my movie reviews that bring in the bread and butter, but I don’t have to write about something I’m not interested in. That’s a wonderful freedom – I love it. RK: I have noticed at least one piece you’ve written for non&shy;fiction publication turn up in your fiction – that piece you wrote about cremation. I recognised it in Cosmo Cosmolino. HG: Well, that’s the biggest example I can think of, of a piece where I’ve actually gone out and researched and experienced that I’ve written for journalism, and then I’ve just basically taken the guts of it and used it in fiction. Of course it was an extraordinary experience; I feel that going to the crematorium that time, in the way that I’ve described in True Stories, was a moment that completely changed my life. Watching that body being consumed by fire completely changed my way of looking at life and thinking what it meant. Consequently, when I came to write that rather peculiar book, Cosmo Cosmolino, which has the middle story called ‘A Vigil’, the story is about a chap who, by slackness, allows somebody to die and he is taken to the crematorium and obliged, by these strange beings who I think are angels probably, to watch the dead girl’s body be burnt. What I did was I just took the things that I saw in a non-fiction sort of way and I used them or tried to get some kind of numinous meaning out of them. RK: I remember the pacemaker that was left. HG: Yes, an old-fashioned pacemaker that had come through. The man showed me a box of things that had come through the fire. Extraordinary things. There was a pacemaker, there were the toe caps off an old man’s boots and a little porcelain dish that looked as if it had been on a little girl’s dressing table. Incredibly touching things. RK: When you say that that experience changed your life, how did it change? HG: I felt then that life can’t possibly end at death. I’m saying I felt, rather than I think or believe, because I think that I have a sort of a religious cast to my nature which I probably fought for a long time, and at a certain point I thought that I’d better examine it and see what it was. And it’s still very mysterious to me. I suppose I would call myself a Christian but if there was an exam at the door they wouldn’t let me in, because I’m not all that interested in ideas of heaven and hell. Heaven seems kind of absurd to me really, except in some metaphorical sense perhaps. If you watch a body being consumed by fire, the thing you notice about it is this tremendous concentration of force and energy that’s around that process. It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with death. I felt in some way cracked open by that experience of seeing the body burn. I’m not interested in talking about what I believe in this area, because that always seems so intellectual. The whole thing opened up some tremendous metaphorical realm to my imagination. RK: Being cowardly is something you have talked about, in those terms, lots of times over the years. In the book you talk about the importance of your being as hard on yourself as you might be on the people you’re writing about. HG: It seems only fair, because I don’t like the idea of setting myself up as a moral arbiter or judge or something - and it would be totally inappropriate. Also it’s partly because I am interested in myself, as everyone is. Maybe I am a bit more than one should be, I sometimes think. I guess it seems only fair. But it’s also because, I think, I tend to write about situations that I have also been involved in. So to be describing another person’s behaviour without reference to your own and how it might have fed into what they were doing, would seem to be, in a sense, truncating the subject that you’re talking about. RK: Morag Fraser reviewed True Stories in the April Australian Book Review and talks about, in her words, your determination to winkle out the truth in complex human relationships and the particular epiphanies that happen in your work. I wonder whether those moments of great and sudden revelation that you convey to the reader are ones that occur to you before you write, while you’re in the situation, or do they come only as a result of being written? HG: Both. Some things you see while you’re actually witnessing them: you’re so thunderstruck that there’s no way that you’re ever going to forget them. Writing about them then is so far from your mind that even if you have a notebook in your hand you’re just making squiggles that will remind you of things later. A strange thing happened, actually, when I went to the maternity hospital that I’ve written about in True Stories. I saw a woman giving birth to twins. It was so extraordinary that when I went back to my hotel afterwards, I had this terrific urge to smoke. I’ve never smoked. I thought, I wish I had a cigarette, I wish I smoked. And I realised then that it was because I just couldn’t bear to be that close to what I’d seen. I needed to put something between me and it, or to damp down the emotions that are provoked in me, and smoking, was the strange thing that came to mind, to put up a shield. RK: If we meditate on the title of this book, True Stories, the words can work against each other. HG: The two words do bounce off each other. I don’t spend all that much time puzzling over what’s true and what’s not because if I did I would just flip right out. I sort of feel anxious and irritable when I think about these things, so obviously there is something important in there that needs to be worked out. RK: We’ve talked about fiction and non-fiction, truth and story, and interpretation when The First Stone came out. Is that the kind of level at which you feel anxious and irritated? HG: No. Just as a general philosophical question, what’s true and what’s made up. Especially if you’re in my line of work, it just becomes more and more a vexed question to which there isn’t an answer. I suspect that this will be something that I have to puzzle over for the rest of my life. RK: What kind of puzzling have you done over it? HG: Well, not just moral puzzling but when you’re writing about life in all its messiness, there is a tendency to want to impose order on things. But in order to impose order you sometimes feel tempted to just drop in a teeny weeny little thing that isn’t totally true, or that didn’t … let’s say actual rather than true because it will add a little moment of gracious curve or something like that to what you’re writing. In fiction, of course, you can pretty well give free reign to that because you are the boss; you’re the god of the book. You can make it be how you want. So when you’re writing non-fiction, especially if you’ve got a lot of experience writing fiction, your natural tendency is to think: I can make this, I can link that with that, and you think wait a minute, it didn’t happen like that. I can’t do that ...You must have read about Janet Malcolm. That was so fascinating, I thought, the fact that she got into trouble for writing up two interviews as if they were one big conversation. I bet I’m not the only journalist in the world who broke out in a cold sweat at that point. I thought, but everybody does that – I don’t think that means necessarily that you’re falsifying the gist of what this person meant or how you perceive them, but there are obviously different levels of what people consider to be fair dealing. This is an edited version of the interview broadcast on Radio National’s Books and Writing, reproduced here courtesy of Ramona Koval and Radio National.

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