Too often, we precisely monitor the former and profligately praise the latter. “Honesty” is a word that, when thrown at journalism, unhelpfully describes both a baseline and a vaguer horizon, a legal minimum and an ethical summum. With characteristic briskness, she tells us that she learned two things from him: “Firstly, to start an essay without bullshit preamble, and secondly, that betrayal is part of life.” She continues, “I value it as part of my store of experience-part of what I am and how I have learnt to understand the world.” A writing lesson and a life lesson: Garner’s work as a journalist and a novelist constantly insists on the connection between writing about life and comprehending it to try to do both responsibly and honestly-without bullshit preamble, or, for that matter, bullshit amble-is what it means to be alive. In the early nineteen-sixties, when the Australian writer Helen Garner was a student at the University of Melbourne, she had a brief relationship with a twenty-four-year-old man who was her tutor. Helen Garner inspects both herself and her subjects with savage honesty.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |