Helen Garner, at 83, on three marriages, being hated and a book about a football team
Australian author Helen Garner, who is 83, has spoken about surviving three marriages and being called a "rotten feminist", in an interview with The Guardian published on 31 October 2026.
She spoke by video call from her home in Melbourne. The conversation covers her personal life, her reputation and her latest book, The Season. Garner is best known for her novels and nonfiction, and her first novel, Monkey Grip, came out in 1977.
The Season is about a teenager's football team. Her grandson Ambrose played for a local Australian rules football team, which is the game most Australians call footy. Garner watched his U16s side, the Flemington Colts, through one season, and that season became the book. U16 means players under 16.
Garner has a light way of describing the project. She called it "a nanna's book", using the Australian word for grandmother. It is a modest label for a book that follows a team, its families and its weekend games in close detail.
Her own life has been written about at length. In the Guardian interview she describes a marriage she now regards with clear eyes. She said she thought it was the worst marriage in the world, and that she was "the world's biggest wimp for going along with it." She also talked about the public anger that followed her 1995 book The First Stone, which dealt with feminism and sexual harassment on university campuses. The feminist label she has been given comes from that period of debate.
Garner's diaries won the Baillie Gifford Prize, a British award for nonfiction, which the Guardian covered in an interview in November 2025. The prize is one of the better-known honours for writing that is true to life rather than invented. Garner has also spoken publicly about her relationships in the past. In a 2022 interview with The Paris Review, a literary magazine, she described falling in love with a heroin addict after she had become a newly single mother.
Her book This House of Grief, published in 2014, dealt with a different kind of pain, a 2005 court case in Victoria in which a father was accused of drowning his three children. Garner covered that case, and the book followed.
Garner has also reached a younger audience than her earlier readers might expect. The pop singer Dua Lipa interviewed her on Dua Lipa's podcast, a conversation that gave Garner's work a new listening audience.
Being talked about, even when it stings, is part of a long career. Garner's answers in the Guardian interview are frank, and she does not hide the sharp parts. Readers who want the full conversation can find it on the Guardian's website.
