Honour & Other People's Children

Honour & Other People's Children was Helen Garner's follow-up to her immensely successful Monkey Grip: the difficult second album. Apparently she originally intended to write something similar to her first novel (I guess that meant mining her diaries in the same way) but couldn't make it work, so the noven-in-progress was split into two separate novellas. (I always have trouble remembering that Honour is one story and Other People's Children is another.) 

Honour, the novella I prefer, centres around a separated couple and the challenge to their amicable, long-standing relationship when the man wants to marry his new partner. Other People's Children concerns friendship and share-house politics, the breakdown of a friendship between Ruth and Scotty, and a possible new relationship for Scotty with the unattractive Madigan. Unfortunately I found Madigan so unappealing that I had no interest in whether or not he and Scotty would get together.

The autobiographical elements are not difficult to discern, though it seems that Ruth and Scotty both contain elements of Garner herself. Scotty seems closer to Garner in personality, but Ruth is the one with children, to whom childless Scotty is deeply attached and is likely to lose if the household breaks down. There's less meat in these novellas than there is in Monkey Grip, and I don't think Other People's Children entirely succeeds, but even a flawed Helen Garner book is always worth reading.