#AWW 2019 True Stories

• Author:  Helen Garner
  
• Title: True Stories
  
• Published: 1996
  
• Genre: essays
• Rating: A+++++
• List of Challenges 2019
• Monthly plan
• #AWW2019      @AusWomenWriter

Conclusion:

1. Yet again, another Helen Garner book
2. …that I did NOT want to end!
3. She is a magnificent wirter and I am
4. glued to the page with the vivid details she  provides.
5. I kept this book under my pillow (IPod audio book)
6. to transport me to the ‘reading room’ between
7. being awake ….and asleep.
8. Some stories I had to listen to twice
9. …fell asleep before the ending.
10. Who does not wake up at 3 am sometimes for no reason?
11. This audio book was the perfect ‘sleeping pill’.
12. Helen Garner’s voice is soothing and you drift off quickly.

Last thoughts:

Favorites:

1. Selections about her sisters
2. Cruising on  Russian ocean liner
3. Five train trips in the region of Melbourne
4. Stories about authors, Patrick White and Elizabeth Jolley
5. The Insults of Age
6. Marriage
7. Death
8. Labour Maternity Ward, Penrith
9. These are only a few that really impressed me.
10. One story I started but could not finish:
11. Killing Daneil.
12. Garner is known for her true crime books
13. …and this story was just too distressing (child abuse)
14. So, you are warned….you can just skip it…as I did.

• Helen Garner delves deeply into a crime
• so vivdly it is impossible to read….and I imagine
• just as hard to put on paper.
• It is an extraordinary way of writing.
• She has to take care that
• ..she is not “drawn into the darkness”
• …of the subject she is writing about.
• Her books,  for example This House of Grief
• have taken an emotional an
• physical toll on Helen Garner.

#MustMustRead

1. A book to read leisurely….
   
2. that stays with you for a lifetime.