Although the October 1972 article was considered 'unsolicited', Garner wrote that she had intended to give a lesson on Ancient Greece, but the textbooks given to her students had been defaced with sexually explicit drawings. She had written an essay about the lesson and published it under a pen name in The Digger, a countercultural Melbourne-based magazine. In 1972, Garner was sacked by the Victorian Department of Education for 'giving an unscheduled sex education lesson to her 13-year-old students at Fitzroy High School'.

Her only child, the actor, musician and writer Alice Garner, was born in 1969. In 1967, she also travelled overseas and met Bill Garner, whom she married in 1968 on their return to Australia, aged 25.

Janet Clarke Hall, where Garner resided in the 1960s as a student of the University of Melbourneīetween 19, Garner worked as a teacher at various Victorian high schools. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) site has characterised her as one of Australia's 'most important and admired writers', while The Guardian referred to her as 'Australia's greatest living writer'. She has thrice written true-crime books: first with The First Stone, about the aftermath of a sexual-harassment scandal at a university, followed by Joe Cinque's Consolation, a journalistic novel about the court proceedings involving a young man who died at the hands of his girlfriend, which won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Crime Book, and again in 2014 with This House of Grief, about Robert Farquharson, a man who drove his children into a dam. Garner's works have covered a broad range of themes and subject matter. Adaptations of two of her works have appeared as feature films: her debut novel Monkey Grip and her true-crime book Joe Cinque's Consolation (2004)-the former released in 1982 and the latter in 2016. She has also written for film and theatre, and has consistently won awards for her work, including the Walkley Award for a 1993 Time magazine report. She attracted controversy with her book The First Stone (1995) about a sexual-harassment scandal in a university college. Throughout her career, Garner has written both fiction and non-fiction.

She has a reputation for incorporating and adapting her personal experiences in her fiction, something that has brought her widespread attention, particularly with her novels, Monkey Grip and The Spare Room (2008). Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, immediately established her as an original voice on the Australian literary scene-it is now widely considered a classic. Helen Garner (née Ford, born 7 November 1942) is an Australian novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter and journalist.

The Spare Room by Helen Garner