In this episode of Biographers in Conversation, Gabriella chats with Bernadette Brennan about her choices while crafting A Writing Life. Helen Garner and her Work, a literary portrait of one of Australia’s most vital and revered authors.

Here’s what you’ll discover in this episode:

• Why Bernadette Brennan felt compelled to write A Writing Life.
• Why Bernadette chose to craft A Writing Life as a literary portrait of Helen Garner rather than as a conventional biography.
• Why Bernadette opened A Writing Life with a scene in which an agitated Garner is a panelist at a writers’ conference.
• How Bernadette disentangled Garner’s human story from her writing given that Garner’s life and writing inform and shape each other.
• Why Bernadette views A Writing Life as genre-bending.
• Why Bernadette structured the portrait around literary analysis of each of Garner’s books, and why she thinks of the chapters in A Writing Life as rooms in ‘Garner’s house of writing’.
• Why Bernadette ended A Writing Life with an email from Garner about her Bible reading group and her remark: ‘Our immersion in a (mighty) text brings everyone to his (or her) best self’.

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