Being in Helen Garner’s house was nothing to Maya; she’d known Helen for years. So when I arrived on the doorstep, bottle in hand, accepting Maya’s invitation to dinner, I tried hard to make it mean nothing to me either. Not only because being star-struck is a very disturbing experience—a little like unrequited love in its excruciating reduction of the self to a quivering point in the face of one who, of course, knows nothing of you—but also out of respect: I felt that Helen would have no problem with her house-sitter inviting a friend over for dinner, but that she might not approve of that friend drooling on the furniture.

Helen was on the road promoting Joe Cinque’s Consolation, but was returning the next day and then moving out of her house within a week. Maya’s part of the house-sitting deal was that she pack Helen’s books into boxes. And before dinner, Maya asked if I might help her. Until then I had managed it: I had felt almost nothing about being in Helen’s house. But books? Books are different. Books are intimate in a way that goes beyond the domestic. Between the covers of a book lies a private experience shared by no-one else. Would I help Maya take Helen Garner’s books, one by one, handle each of them in turn, and put them into boxes? I played it cool.