Reviews of A Writing Life:

'Bernadette Brennan's splendid A Writing Life: Helen Garner and her Work is a timely and important book. It's a critical biography, with a deft and intelligent focus on the whole body of Garner's work, but rich in biographical detail to situate the course of a writing life in the lived experience which produced. it.  The works are analysed meticulously, sensitively, carefully, and the reader's reward is to be granted access to a biographical context for each book which richly enhances your understanding of and appreciation of Garner's long and wonderful career. The book is all the better for its in-depth analysis of the three major non-fiction books since 2000. Brennan's depiction of the arduousness and audacity of Garner's fearless approach to the very difficult subject of The First Stone, Joe Cinque's Consolation and This House of Grief is beautifully modulated - a real triumph. She has captured and interpreted an important writer and her work beautifully.'

David Gaunt, Books and Publishing, March 2017

A Writing Life, academic Bernadette Brennan’s new thoughtful and ambitious study of Helen Garner and her work, demonstrates a deep engagement with the philosophical quandaries that beset anyone attempting to chronicle the life and work of a writer. Brennan acknowledges the impossibility of ever being able to render the full complexity of a human life and clarifies that she did not set out to write either a conventional biography (something Garner was opposed to), or a dispassionate monograph. She wanted a wider field and she casts her study as a “literary portrait,” drawing on Garner’s books, journals, letters, notebooks and unpublished writing — including her embargoed papers — as well as extensive interviews with friends, editors and relatives, and with Garner herself.

The New York Times journalist Richard Eder once wrote that a skilled interviewer needs “alertness to the answer that hints at a life half-hidden and stimulates a question that gets it to emerge, shake itself and look around”. Brennan possesses this rare talent and she proves a canny interlocutor for Garner, their conversations forming an essential and fascinating part of the book. Garner frequently offers fresh reflections and insights in response to Brennan’s questions and conjectures, in a process that many writers would find terrifying.

Brennan herself writes with an eloquence and perceptiveness equal to her subject. Her tone is never overly reverential or adulatory, the close analysis of the texts is lucid and intelligent and she is not afraid to probe difficult and controversial aspects of Garner’s life and work.

Alice Nelson The West Australian, 21 March 2017

I loved this book...Brennan has produced a literary portrait that more than does its subject justice. The book explores Garner's work chronologically and what emerges is its originality and the way it challenges our preconceptions through her strong views - views that are often counter to prevailing orthodoxies. ...Bernadette Brennan has done us all a great favour in delivering this immensely enjoyable book. 

Mark Rubbo, Readings Monthly, March 2017

Bernadette Brennan acknowledges how fraught it is to balance the personal life and published work of someone who, in both her fiction and non-fiction, is as self-representational as Garner, but her book manages to do so admirably. She's respectful without being idolatrous and, to her credit, not afraid to criticise Garner when she feels it's necessary...Brennan is an astute and sensitive reader of Garner's work, with observant analysis of her fragmented style and the 'short stabs' of her prose, as well as her recurring preoccupations and characters...

Thuy On, The Big Issue 7, 20 April 2017

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