Art & Creativity Quote by Helen Garner

Garner doesn’t dress this up as “interest” or “concern”; she goes straight to “obsessed,” a word that admits a loss of distance. That’s the tell. As a novelist, she’s signaling that the book’s engine isn’t the tidy moral arithmetic people want from stories about crime and consequence, but a gnawing, repetitive mental loop: sentencing as an object you circle because it won’t resolve. The line’s halting, clause-stacked rhythm (“Now, I - for several years…”) mimics that compulsion. It reads like someone catching themselves mid-thought, then pressing on anyway, as if the subject is bigger than the sentence can hold.

The specific intent is to justify the book’s gaze on the machinery of punishment without pretending to be a jurist. Garner plants herself in the messy human zone between empathy and judgment, where the courtroom’s “decision” is less verdict-as-truth than verdict-as-produced. “How judges arrive” shifts attention from the defendant’s story (the usual narrative magnet) to the judge’s interior process: pressure, precedent, temperament, the performance of neutrality. That’s a sly cultural move. It invites readers to see sentencing not as a final moral stamp but as an institutional ritual with human fingerprints all over it.

Subtextually, she’s confessing complicity: if you’re obsessed with punishment, you’re also interrogating your own appetite for retribution, closure, and spectacle. The context is Garner’s long-running project of observing real cases and the frictions they expose in Australian public life: between victims and offenders, between feminist anger and due process, between the hunger for certainty and the law’s stubborn ambiguity.