Australian true-crime author Helen Garner has always subverted expectations of good and evil and what's worth noticing. At 80, she's earning attention in the U.S.
On the day of our interview, Helen Garner didn’t win the Nobel Prize for Literature. “Imagine there are people who actually think they might win it, and they get all excited, and it sort of breaks my heart that anyone would hold this hope and every year they feel disappointed,” says Garner, speaking on video from her home in Australia. “That’s really awful.” Garner would be forgiven for considering herself a Nobel contender, considering her five-decade body of acclaimed work.
“It had this huge mystique about it, a kind of horror mystique. It was perhaps seen as a death sentence, a sort of suicidal urge. I do know that when I wrote that book, anybody we knew who was using seemed to be going further out than the rest of us could handle.” Garner knows the feeling of testing the outer limits — albeit in writing — and especially in her true-crime work. That began in the early ’80s when she sat in on the trial of a couple accused of murdering two teenagers.
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