This House Of Grief isn’t just a true crime story – it’s a devastating, unflinching masterclass in narrative non-fiction. In Dua’s Monthly Read for August, Helen Garner takes us deep into the murder trial of Robert Farquharson – a man accused of murdering his three sons by driving his car into a dam.
With razor-sharp prose and aching humanity, Helen lays bare the courtroom drama, the emotional wreckage and the haunting questions that linger long after a verdict – as she explores in her conversation with Dua for the Service95 Book Club. She invites us to look beyond guilt or innocence, asking not just what happened, but exploring the painful extremes of human behaviour. This House Of Grief isn’t a book about resolution – it’s about what it means to witness unimaginable loss, and to try to make sense of the senseless.
Here, Helen shares the books that informed her writing. “These are a few of the books that I’ve loved and been heartened by,” she says. “Writing that shows me how it’s done, fills me with energy when I’ve nearly run out, and blasts me out of my anxiety and fear.”
True Grit by Charles Portis
“This is the novel I love most in all the world. Mattie Ross is 14 when a cowardly thief shoots her father dead. She hires a weary, ill-tempered old gunslinger and rides out with him in wintertime to hunt the killer down. I am crazy about the way Mattie tells her story: it’s a sublime lesson in how to write voice. Its blunt rhythms and surging drive conjure up a character so severely righteous, so innocently hilarious and wise, that I want to let out shouts of joy.”
Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose
“This witty, audacious study of five Victorian-era marriages was first published in 1983, but it will never lose its freshness. I reread it when I was trying to imagine, for This House Of Grief, how Robert Farquharson’s marriage crashed and burned – and there it was again, in black and white, the sore fact we work so hard to ignore – ‘the human tendency to invoke love at moments when we want to disguise transactions involving power’.”
Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? by Raymond Carver
“From Raymond, I learned how little you need to put on the page. It’s a lesson I have to learn again, whenever I start to write: cut, cut, cut.”
Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich
“Svetlana, from Belarus, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2015. This book is a panorama of the lives of ordinary people who lived through the collapse of the Soviet Union. ‘I compose my books out of thousands of voices, destinies, fragments of our life and being... I am writing a history of human feelings.’ The scale of her inquiry is symphonic, and yet she gives full value to experiences of the tenderest intimacy.”
The Journalist And The Murderer by Janet Malcolm
“I never met Janet, but she taught me everything I know. From all her marvellous books, I learnt how not to be scared – how to stride into a non-fiction story and draw the reader in with me, instead of nervously standing on the threshold and trying to maintain detachment. She showed me how to dig deep, to use and to interpret everything I observe, and not hold back out of politeness or timidity.”
It doesn’t stop there: get under the skin of This House Of Grief with more from the Service95 Book Club...
WATCH Dua’s interview with the author, Helen Garner
LISTEN to the interview on the go with the new Service95 Book Club podcast
READ why Helen Garner is the fearless Australian voice the world is finally listening to
