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A review by roguepingu
The First Stone: 25th Anniversary Edition by Leigh Sales, Helen Garner, Jennifer Vuletic
5.0
I think this is an excellent book but I did not enjoy reading it.
I put off reading The First Stone for ages because I thought I would hate it. And – for the record – I don’t. (Although neither do I like it). I actually think Garner’s motivations and aims for this book are admirable. I found her self-interrogation an important insight into a point of view which I had never encountered in such intimate detail before. As such, I believe that the critiques of the book’s lack of ‘objectivity’ are missing the point. Nonetheless, I disagreed with most (but by no means all) of Garner’s stances in the book. I won’t go into detail on those disagreements here because that nitpicking work has already been over-done and most of my objections were articulated in one way or another in the additional material at the end of this particular edition.
Speaking of which, I don’t think I could have stomached reading this “reportage” as well as I did if it had not been for the design of this edition. The 25th anniversary edition has a foreword provided by Leigh Sales which prepared me well for the main text. It underlined what I would find to be Garner’s faults but also highlighted what I, too, found to be the positive points of Garner’s questioning. In other words, it provided a few firm posts to help me navigate through what I found to be a frustrating narrative. The back end material – an afterword by Garner’s biographer, a 1995 interview with Garner, and Garner’s 1995 address on the book – was a helpful means of de-briefing and figuring out what I had just read.
Would highly recommend reading this book regardless of what one thinks of Garner’s views. I would say that this book still stands as relevant today but perhaps would have been written in a very different way in a 2021 context.
I put off reading The First Stone for ages because I thought I would hate it. And – for the record – I don’t. (Although neither do I like it). I actually think Garner’s motivations and aims for this book are admirable. I found her self-interrogation an important insight into a point of view which I had never encountered in such intimate detail before. As such, I believe that the critiques of the book’s lack of ‘objectivity’ are missing the point. Nonetheless, I disagreed with most (but by no means all) of Garner’s stances in the book. I won’t go into detail on those disagreements here because that nitpicking work has already been over-done and most of my objections were articulated in one way or another in the additional material at the end of this particular edition.
Speaking of which, I don’t think I could have stomached reading this “reportage” as well as I did if it had not been for the design of this edition. The 25th anniversary edition has a foreword provided by Leigh Sales which prepared me well for the main text. It underlined what I would find to be Garner’s faults but also highlighted what I, too, found to be the positive points of Garner’s questioning. In other words, it provided a few firm posts to help me navigate through what I found to be a frustrating narrative. The back end material – an afterword by Garner’s biographer, a 1995 interview with Garner, and Garner’s 1995 address on the book – was a helpful means of de-briefing and figuring out what I had just read.
Would highly recommend reading this book regardless of what one thinks of Garner’s views. I would say that this book still stands as relevant today but perhaps would have been written in a very different way in a 2021 context.