THE SEASON: A Fan's Story, a beautiful gift given out of love

THE SEASON: A Fan's Story
HELEN GARNER
Pantheon Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$13.99 ebook, available now

One of Lit Hub’s 43 Favorite Books of 2025!

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: From the beloved master of Australian letters Helen Garner comes a brand new work of nonfiction, exploring boyhood, football, and the quotidian joys of family life.

Helen Garner is one of the most “prodigiously gifted” writers of our time (The New York Times Book Review), best known for her intricate portraits of “ordinary people in difficult times” (New York Times). In The Season, she trains her keen, journalistic eye on the most difficult time of all: adolescence.

Garner and her grandson Amby are deep in the throes of a shared obsession with Australian football—or “footy”—as Amby advances into his local club’s Under-16s. From her trademark remove, Garner documents the camaraderie and the competition on the field: the bracing nights of training, the endurance of pain, the growth of a gaggle of laughing boys into a formidable, focused team.

The Season is part dispatch on boyhood, chronicling the tenderness between young men that so often scurries away under too bright a spotlight, and part love letter to parenthood and family, as Garner becomes enmeshed in the community that gathers to watch their boys do battle. The Season finds Garner rejoicing in the later years of her life, surprised to discover their riches—a bright, generously funny, exuberant book from one of our great living writers.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I really like Helen Garner's writing, enjoy her choices of subject matter, and really resonate with the worldview she puts out:

A little rush of desolation. It doesn't matter if I'm not there. No one needs me. I'm not essential after all. I'm only a witness. It's one of the sporadic bursts of reality that grandparents have to bear. You're making a serious mistake if you start to think you're near the centre. You're on the periphery. You're a servant. A hanger-on. And soon you'll be dead.

Preach, my sister.

What hasn't, won't, can't really die is the pleasure of an honest writer facing up to a tough subject (and there is no tougher subject than getting old!) with clear eyes, a willing heart, and a lifetime of practice, just...getting on with it. That is Helen Garner's métier. She speaks of her teenaged grandson with the mingled pride, amusement, and nostalgia for the rapidity of time and change carting away the one you made memories with while leaving a very roughly similar but perilously unfamiliar person in their place. I completely relate. Parents, grands, aging family members all feel a similar way, and what interests us is how much we obliviously assumed about our own pasts. Did we do better than they did? What Aunt Doraflora meant that one time she said the thing that made Dad so damn mad...oh! makes sense now, as we watch our futures doing, learning, figuring out in front of us.

The real matter of the writer is always life. Helen Garner has never once in a long career lost sight of that. Here she grapples with life changed beyond recognition, obsessions incomprehensible, worries she has no way to connect to, while knowing how much she loves; learning how much she is loved; and grappling with The End. "Really I’m trying to write about footy and my grandson and me. About boys at dusk. A little life-hymn. A poem. A record of a season we are spending together before he turns into a man and I die."

It is a gift you leave him, Helen Garner, that he will open many times in his life. And, in his turn, in a world as different from this one you both briefly cohabited in as you and I can't even conjure, he will understand your thoughts and feelings. They will resemble yours...despite the immense gulf between you in time, you will connect on the humanness of being old, being alive without certainty, and...I know you hope, and so do I...feeling loved from ahead and behind.