I So Love Being Old and Not Married

Our unlocked interview with Helen Garner.

The Paris Review Redux: free interviews, stories, poems, and art from the archives of The Paris Review. View this email in your browser At her Primrose Gully property in Victoria, ca. 1986. Courtesy of Helen Garner. "Garner has given us diaries that read like they are inventing a new language made from utterly familiar materials," writes Leslie Jamison in a piece we published last week on Helen Garner's diaries. "They are seductively loose and nimble, delivering shards of experience rather than an overdetermined narrative, pivoting from sharpened skewers of observation ('The writers' festival. It's like being barbecued') to a clear-eyed claiming of pleasure ('tear meat off a chicken and stuff it into her mouth'), swerving from deep reckonings with romantic intimacy and dissolution to sudden, perfect aphorisms hidden like Easter eggs in the grass." This week, we're unlocking our Art of Fiction interview with Helen Garner, which was published in issue no. 241 of the Review and can be read alongside a selection from Garner's recent journals, which we published on our website in 2022. INTERVIEW The Art of Fiction No. 255 Helen Garner GARNER I write my diary last thing before I go to sleep or first thing in the morning, sitting up in bed. I'll write down an interesting dream, or what happened that day, or something that one of my grandkids said to me. I don't think of the diaries as work. That's why I like them. I like the way I write them, because it's not anxious. I might be describing something I'm anxious about, but the actual writing process isn't anxious, because there's no one breathing down my neck … I found that when I was editing my diaries for publication, I didn't need to revise or polish them that much. That made me see that the diaries are how I turned myself into a writer—­there's my ten thousand hours. From issue no. 241 (Fall 2022) Driving across the Nullarbor Plain, 1984. Courtesy of Helen Garner. THE DAILY I So Love Being Old and Not Married Helen Garner God, I so love being old and not married. Out the other side of sex and love and all that torment. I can go out drinking martinis with the clever young guys I'm friends with—well, actually they're middle-aged. With gray hair. Last night the bar was almost empty, the football was playing on the big screen with the sound down low. Every now and then I'd look up and see some outrageous piece of thuggery that caused me to exclaim and curse, while the men went on talking in wise, quiet voices about books and biography and publishing. By what exercise of virtue have I deserved this? October 3, 2022 To read more from issue no. 241, including an interview with Terrance Hayes, why not subscribe? You'll receive four print issues a year plus unlimited digital access to our seventy-one-year archive. Copyright © 2025 The Paris Review. All rights reserved. You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website. Our mailing address is: The Paris Review 544 West 27th Street 3rd Floor New York, New York 10001 Add us to your address book Want to change how you receive these emails? You can update your preferences or unsubscribe, if you must.