We were in a great, seething moment in the 1970s. There was a new Labour government and everything seemed full of hope... But, as we got older and we saw how much women's behaviour contributed to what was wrong, we stopped being able to see ourselves purely as.
From Helen Garner
But there are some wounds that can never be healed.
I tell you one thing that makes me feel I haven't wasted my life, and that is I've got some grandchildren. You can't overestimate the kind of opening to the future that gives a person, I think.
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction.
People demand a lot of the justice system and they demand things that it can't deliver.
It's disturbing at my age to look at a young woman's destructive behaviour and hear the echoes of it, of one's own destructiveness in youth.
It's a terrific privilege to be able to see into somebody else's life.
It's very shocking, I think, for people caring for the dying to realise how unsaintly they feel, how much anger is mixed up with their grief. In fact, often I think the anger that they feel is a form of grief; it's a kind of raging against what's happening.
Life's fairly excruciating. Painful things happen. Every now and then, you drag yourself out of the stream and stand on the bank gasping for air. I think that's how I work.
2 perspectives
1 perspectives