Days to Remember

·47 min·4 clips

Alex Clark and Lucy Dallas debate peonies and a wild cat in the raspberry bed before turning to literary matters.

Peonies do the first work. Alex Clark and Lucy Dallas begin among buds, black irises, lupins, raised beds, and a dog who has no patience for hardening-off plants. It is a funny, homely start, and very TLS: garden fuss beside reading life, neither of them treated as small. From there, the talk turns inward. The speakers consider a book about how people make sense of themselves while events and private strains press in around them. Three women carry that part of the discussion. Their stories sit in different eras, braided in a way that sounds ready for film. The film, though, gives them trouble. Nicole Kidman playing Virginia Woolf with a prosthetic nose becomes the thing devoted Woolf readers cannot stop seeing. Place matters too. The speakers wish the adaptation had used one of Virginia Woolf's houses; those rooms might have done some quiet work of their own. Then the lens opens again. A comparison to Thelma and Louise turns the ending into a jump toward possibility, not a shutdown. Mark Hussey's book gets similar treatment, keeping Mrs Dalloway alive in universities, films, books, and ordinary rereading without pretending there is one clean ending. Helen Garner closes the hour. Claire talks through twenty years of Garner's life, where diaries can feel almost too private and still work as a writer's notebook. Garner comes across close-up and just out of reach, catching phrases, trying language, and leaving the reader a little off balance. Somehow the mood stays easy. Flower beds, Woolf, film, afterlives, diaries: the episode wanders, but it knows exactly how to wander.

As heard by us

A calm literary conversation on Mrs Dalloway, Helen Garner's diaries, and the lives books take on beyond the page.

Garden talk gives way to a clear, literary discussion of afterlives: how Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway keeps moving through teaching, film, and later books.

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Why you'd press play

Press play when you want literary conversation that can move from a peony to Mrs Dalloway without losing its thread.

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