This story was in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday and it gave me a chuckle. Helen Garner is an Australian writer who turned female middle class naval-gazing in to an art form.

She makes Joan Didion look like a stand-up comic.

Now at 81 she has written a ‘happy book’ about Australian Rules Football.

Fuck me dead. I mean they shoot horses don’t they? Why not ageing Boomers?

I blame Helen Garner and her first book, Monkey Grip, for driving a whole generation of young women from careers in architecture, engineering and medicine to creative writing courses, to be taught by people who fundamentally can’t write.

The Sydney Morning Herald takes up the story:

“Helen Garner’s decision to write a first-person account of her grandson’s junior footy team, its travails and triumphs and her exploration of both the game and his exit from adolescence, was replete with self-doubt.

She wondered whether she was up to the task of writing a happy story. Aged 81 when she began following the Flemington Colts, she was unsure whether she was capable of completing the book.

Throughout The Season, Garner also flaunts her lack of footy knowledge, asking Ambrose or his footy-head father to decipher the arcane rules and rites of an obsessively followed code.

“I’m used to writing about people who are in traumatic states, but they’ve lost everything and people have died and there’s been a murder or something like that,” says Garner.

“I thought, geez, this is a happy story. How am I going to write this?”

It reads like she’s a visitor to a foreign country, as in Mark Twain’s account of Australia (especially the Melbourne Cup) or even Alexis de Tocqueville, the 19th century French nobleman, observing the United States for his tome Democracy in America.”

The rest of the article may be found here: