One of the most emotionally true stories I've read about illness, caregiving, and friendship. #aww2013 ( )

A woman cares for her friend as she is dying and denying that she is dying from cancer. ( )

I picked this up at 2:30 and finished it by 7:00 the same day. I thought it was extraordinary. It is the story of two 60-something friends, Helen and Nicola. Nicola who has advanced cancer asks Helen if she can come and stay with her in Melbourne while she undergoes a three-week experimental, shysterish treatment. Both women were and are bohemians, although Nicola is the one more entranced by alternative-whatever.
It is amazing the economy, in under 200 pages, with which Garner deals with a number of minor characters and a tightly composed plot that manages to touch on a variety of topics including friendship, death, medicine, family. What stood out to me most was the conflict between carer Helen and patient Nicola: the denial, the fear and anger, the urge to do the right thing versus the things that are not clearly in Nicola’s best interest, the ambiguities threaded throughout.
The book is sad and funny. It did remind me of my mother’s death and the conflict, denial, love, fear, helplessness it entailed. I still don’t understand it but the novel treats of these very issues. Both main characters were appealing and their bond believable. Very well written with more obscure Australia-isms than I knew existed—tinnie, dobbing, manchester, doona, being a few. ( )

Helen accepts Nicola into her home, while Nicola undergoes treatment for her cancer. Helen finds that the treatment is questionable, but Nicola is set on continuing. The relationship between the two women grows strained, and Helen struggles to care for her friend. This book explores the emotions and ethics surrounding a patient and their care, when the choices made by the patient impact their friends and family. ( )

A fine, short, cleansing book, kind of like having a coffee enema. There's nothing complicated going on here, unless you think writing about emotions is complicated: the set up is designed to tug at your heart strings, and it does, and it does so through easy to read prose. Only if you think friendship is easy and people are always good will anything here surprise you. But I suppose some people do think that.

The plot is straightforward: an irritating ex-hippy has cancer, refuses to accept that she's going to die, imposes herself on our narrator Helen, is unpleasant. Helen, too, is unpleasant. There are coffee enemas. There is plenty for people my age to point at as evidence for the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of people roughly Helen Garner's age (i.e., "the sixties might have ruined the fifties, which is nice, but they also ruined what was left of the twentieth century, thanks for that.")

The novel's conclusion is a bit ham-fisted. Rather than leave us to deduce the ex-hippy's death, we get a terrible "As I sat there, I did not know that such and such would happen etc etc... death" chapter, which rather undermines the wonderful economy and restraint of the first 170 (very sparsely type-set) pages.

Well, this sounds harsher than it's meant to. There's nothing wrong with a well-written book that you can read in a day, that won't buy into the silliness of 'alternative therapies,' and doesn't try to BS you in any way about people, death, or cancer. ( )