Since her first novel, Monkey Grip, appeared in 1977, Helen Garner has been one of Australia’s most admired writers of fiction, reportage, essays and criticism. Her first non-fiction book, The First Stone (1995), in which she analyses a case of sexual harassment at Melbourne University, caused a sensation. In The Spare Room(2008), she fictionalises the harrowing story of a close friend’s terminal illness, in a novel dealing with death in a voice that is acute, funny, unsentimental and painfully truthful. The Observer described it as ‘an extraordinary, exhilarating novel … artful, gripping, fiercely beautiful’. In a conversation jointly hosted by the RSL and the Australia/New Zealand Festival of Literature and the Arts, Helen Garner talks to prizewinning novelist and short-story writer Helen Simpson about the boundaries between memory and imagination, literal and imaginative truth, innocence and guilt.
