AustLit

'I bought Bernadette Brennan’s informative and entertaining A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work second-hand in Ganesha, a bookshop on the main street of sleepy Sanur, Bali in December 2018 (having run out of holiday reading). Garner had fascinated me since the film of her debut novel Monkey Grip (1982), directed by Ken Cameron and starring Noni Hazlehurst as Nora and Colin Friels as Javo. I had also been fortunate to know Dr Brennan during her tenure at the University of Sydney, and it was exciting to find such a book among piles of romance novels and crime fiction. A Writing Life has a chronological structure and incorporates biographical detail about Garner in order to illuminate aspects of her writing and it treats all her outputs, fiction, non-fiction, and the film scripts for The Last Days of Chez Nous (1992) and Two Friends (1986).' (Introduction)