I allowed myself to be discouraged from reading Helen Garner's The Spare Room after Robert Dessaix's review in April. His apparently rational assessment led me to join in his distaste for Garner's apparently clinical detachment from her dying friend's terrors.

However, Sandra Hogan's provocative counter-assessment of Garner's novel in Correspondence (also in April), pushed me into finding my own response to it which is simply this: only a person who loves fearlessly could write such a book as The Spare Room. It is an extended letter of a grieving friend's self-reproach written from the front-line of love in all its battles, flawed but dauntless.