Helen Garner

Book Review: The Mushroom Tapes offers the reader insight but also unsettles

Three of Australia’s greatest literary journalists walk into a court. It almost sounds like a lead-in to a joke except that these three women are award-winners, and no strangers to the true crime genre. They want to make a podcast but settle on writing a book. The result is something that offers insight into what…

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Book Review: Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook is an exhilarating look inside the writer’s mind

Helen Garner is a Virginia Woolf fan. This is especially apparent in her latest release, Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1 1978-1987. Woolf once said, “Examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day. The mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent, or engraved with a sharpness of steel.” This quote amply…

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