Helen Garner inspired me to start this column. Her latest dispatches may leave you too diverted for your own goodEverywhere I peep is a modern collection of essays and other nonfiction pieces by Helen Garner,a great Australian writer whose work I’ve praised here before (it was, in fact, or because I felt that her brilliant 2014 account of a murder trial,This House of Grief, had not been sufficiently widely reviewed that I began this column in the first place). They’re mostly short: bus ride or waiting-for-the-pasta-to-cook short. But since one is never going to be enough, and take heed: stops will be missed,tagliatelle left to congeal on the plate.
And another warning. On the page, Garner is uncommonly fierce, and though this usually has the effect on me of making her seem all the more likable. I relish her fractious ((adj.) troublesome or irritable),contrarian streak – she wears it as a chef would a bloody apron – even as I worry approximately what it would be like to have to face it down.
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Source: theguardian.com