Biographers in Conversation

Bernadette Brennan: A Writing Life. Helen Garner and her Work

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In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Gabriella chats with Bernadette Brennan about her choices while crafting A Writing Life. Helen Garner and her Work, a literary portrait of one of Australia’s most vital and revered authors.

 Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

  • Why Bernadette Brennan felt compelled to write A Writing Life. 
  • Why Bernadette chose to craft A Writing Life as a literary portrait of Helen Garner rather than as a conventional biography.
  • Why Bernadette opened A Writing Life with a scene in which an agitated Garner is a panelist at a writers’ conference.
  • How Bernadette disentangled Garner’s human story from her writing given that Garner’s life and writing inform and shape each other. 
  • Why Bernadette views A Writing Life as genre-bending.
  • Why Bernadette structured the portrait around literary analysis of each of Garner’s books, and why she thinks of the chapters in A Writing Life as rooms in ‘Garner’s house of writing’. 
  • Why Bernadette ended A Writing Life with an email from Garner about her Bible reading group and her remark: ‘Our immersion in a (mighty) text brings everyone to his (or her) best self’. 

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