Robert Dessaix on Helen Garner in the Monthly, April 2008...quotes Garner on the process of turning a journal that you keep "because without it you will lose your life" into fiction, by way of following a shape you somehow see in it.

I wonder about the woman who came to stay with Garner, who would be the subject of The Spare Room. If she thought that she might become the subject of a novel - and if that idea would have attracted or repelled her - not to mention the ethics of using a dying person in quite this way.

And of course she (the occupant of the spare room) is not around to disagree with Garner's version of events and interpretation of her desperate need to seek a cure.

Dessaix's review talks a lot about the quality of the prose and of the "penetrating intelligence" and so on that Garner shows. Like Joan Didion, Garner can take a step back - make herself into two people, the subject and the object, as was said in the presentation in class yesterday.

Any writer's autobiograpy is likely to be like this; they spend so much time analysing and dissecting and looking for those shapes that Garner sees; the autobiographies of non-writers are more likely to contain an undifferentiated "I", less self-conscious but not necessarily more true to reality.