bursting silence
Helen Garner's The Spare Room is 5.2 x 8.3 x 0.4 inches & 175 pages.
Welcome to Purse Book, a weekly newsletter about reading hot little books & being a gal on the go. If you haven’t already, you absolutely may subscribe now:
I’ve been making my way through Helen Garner’s collected diaries for a bit. The last volume was just published in the U.S. and, in total, the diaries run from 1978 to 1998. So much of the diary concerns the function of honesty and disclosure in Garner’s relationships. In one moment, Garner visits a friend whose husband has dementia; Garner’s friend won’t seem to acknowledge that anything is difficult about her situation, and it seems incredibly difficult. When Garner attempts to ask her friend how she’s doing, her friend just looks at her in “bursting silence.”
The Spare Room has so, so much bursting silence.
Garner published The Spare Room in 2008. In the novel, a woman named Helen hosts her friend Nicola, who’s traveled to Melbourne to pursue alternative, quack therapy (an aggressive Vitamin C regimen) for her terminal bowel cancer. Helen becomes resentful at Nicola: for chasing false promises, for ignoring her fate, for brushing off the immensity of labor involved in her care. She’s especially mad at Nicola for Nicola’s state of denial about her own death, while everyone else in her life must confront it in their attempts to help her. Helen struggles, fails, struggles again to offer support. The entire novel asks: what’s “support” here? Is it criticizing the harmful treatment or, in bursting silence, surrendering to your friend’s last request?
It’s a feat for a work so short—175 pages—to read as an endurance novel about how much we can give. (An unnamed and dissatisfied Purse Book Club Member reported it took him quite a while to get through). But time and duration are tricky, semi-related beasts; a day engaged in arduous, thankless caregiving can long outlast a month in which you’re not caregiving arduously and thanklessly, and being actively silent when you have something you’re dying to say.
The Spare Room was the most recent Purse Book Gals-On-The-Go Official Book Club Book. Here’s what a few Gals on the Go thought:
“Not the most uplifting travel companion!” - Tyler B., who started this at a bar in NYC and finished it on a couch in Cape Cod
“Not that people weren’t pursuing whackadoo cures for all of time, but this portrait of watching someone get lost into a bogus healing regime feels really prescient now.” - Anna L.
“Wept.” - Emily C.
“It’s very interesting that the Almodovar adaptation of a similar project (Sigrid Nunez’s What Are You Going Through) took an incredibly similar name to Garner’s project: The Room Next Door. There’s something about the proximity that confers the unbreachable distance and intimacy at once.” - Simon K., who read this years ago but remembers it very clearly
If you’d like to join the club, email pursebookletter@gmail.com.
