"What is it all for, these early mornings and evenings in the park with her notebook? The bruises and the pain? She wonders about it many times, but is quiet, self-conscious. She does not spend too much time trying to answer the question. And whatever answers she comes by are less interesting, anyway, than the quality of the light at dawn, and the crash of bodies, and what she's recording in the notebook."
"She envies them for their obliviousness. She worships-not too strong a word-their hardening, growing bodies, their virility, their youth. They play footy, Australian-rules football, as if it is their birthright, and, in her view, it is. She is Helen Garner, one of Australia's best-known writers, renowned for her unsparing novels and journalism, and for her complex view of intimacy and power relations."
"Garner hasn't written a stand-alone book in a decade. She hesitates to tell people she is writing one about watching her grandson playing for the U-16 Flemington Colts. "I keep quiet about this," she writes in " The Season: A Fan's Story," " because I don't want people to think I'm romanticising it, or to reproach me for not writing about women's footy.""
A woman rises early and attends practices and matches, recording observations in a notebook as her grandson plays U-16 Australian-rules football. She focuses on sensory details—the quality of dawn light, the crash of bodies—and on the boys' hardening bodies, virility, and youth. She admires their obliviousness to injury and treats their play as an almost sacred rite of passage. The account rejects analytical or polemical framing and embraces romantic, admiring awe. The woman intends a compact, lyrical record—a life-hymn—of a shared season before the boy matures and her own life ends.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]