AustLit

'The centrepiece of Skin in the Game is an account of an interview with Helen Garner almost 40 years ago. Sonya Voumard, then an 18-year-old cadet journalist, chose Garner as her subject for a university assignment. The interview was convivial and frank – so frank that Garner was shocked when she read the finished piece. “It is always traumatic to see the way another person has perceived you,” she wrote to Voumard, “especially when you feel you have talked a little too freely …” If Garner “learnt a lesson” from the experience, so did her interviewer – although it would take more than 30 years and a second interview with Garner, reappraising the first, to grasp fully the ways in which the disjunct between journalist and subject can leave the latter “slightly pulled askew” (and not just on the page).' (Introduction)