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So I had to go to Zurich again for a few days. My mother wished to see me. And because of my nerves about it, I’d felt so unwell over the whole long weekend that I suffered from severe constipation. On top of this, I should say that I’d written a novel a quarter century ago which I’d titled, for so…

INTERVIEWER

The ending of the novel—­that list of paragraphs all beginning with “And … ”—­is strikingly beautiful.

GARNER

I suppose it’s the book thinking about itself—­about what is going to happen in the world after it stops being a book. I didn’t want the book to fade out. I wanted it t…

I’d always wanted to be around clever people, to be playful with other clever people. My first husband had been involved with a radical theater group that was quite important in Melbourne, and I’d been involved in the feminist arm of it, although I was always a bit of a tourist in that world. But t…

In the early seventies, when my daughter was two, I moved into the first of these hippie houses—­what were called communal houses—in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. It was while I was living there that I had an affair with a guy who was addicted to heroin, and as it rolled on over a year or so, the…

I asked the woman if she liked the president and his wife. She told me that she didn’t like them or dislike them, because she wasn’t interested in them as individuals but as representative historical actors. I didn’t know what she meant by that, “representative historical actors,” so I asked her to…