![]() ![]() If you’ve read Monkey Grip or The First Stone, or Joe Cinque’s Consolation, you’ll know some of the Helen in The Spare Room. ![]() Part of the fascination of fiction, especially a fiction like this, is that it can say both here I am, and no I’m not. We too often think that writing is – is all of – the person who made it, but so much here has been carefully chosen, and so much carefully left out. You can’t just see a fiction author, easy as that. I see you, Helen Garner! That’s a special kind of pleasure, but there’s also the harder pleasure of working to stop doing this. ‘Helen’ in this book is a writer, who lives in Melbourne, next door to her daughter, and as ‘Helen’ does this or that you want to point at the page and say: It’s you! There’s no fiction. Much of the special charge of The Spare Room is that of a fiction that seems to have been made very close to the writers’ life. Over the next three weeks, Helen will change Nicola’s sweated-through sheets again and again, bring her food and drink, and drive her to the shabby little Theodore Institute to get the strange treatments that Nicola believes will make her cancer ‘disappear.’ She has cancer in her liver and her bones. ![]() Helen Garner’s new novel starts with a woman called ‘Helen’ putting out fresh sheets for a friend who’s coming to stay, and thinking: what colour should they be? Helen’s friend, Nicola – lovely, playful, careless, aristocratic Nicola – needs all the help she can get. ![]()
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