The acclaimed Australian novelist, short-story writer and journalist Helen Garner has very little memory of writing her 1984 miniature masterpiece The Children’s Bach, a book that was heavily inspired by music. It was as if, she said in a podcast, another person called Helen Garner had been responsible for this spare, subtle, technically sophisticated novella about a cluster of family and friends in suburban Melbourne.
She described how, years before she wrote it, she had read an intriguing New Yorker interview with a jazz saxophonist. He said, “When I play badly, it’s my fault. When I play well, it’s got nothing to do with me.” She was “blown away by that … I thought: how wonderful, there must be a state you arrive at.
