[3] On 4 September 2005 a car driven by Robert Farquharson left the road and crashed into a dam outside Winchelsea, Victoria, resulting in the deaths of his three sons.

The epigram to the book is "this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief", a quotation from the Hungarian poet Dezső Kosztolányi's novel Kornél Esti.

[10] In an essay in the website The Conversation, the writer was of the opinion that Garner "fails to address the broader issues of gender inequality and male violence".

Craven also noted that Garner had previously written about legal cases as "an old hand at using a novelist’s technique to create a pointillist image of a trial" in The First Stone and Joe Cinque's Consolation.

[2] In the UK daily newspaper The Guardian, Kate Clanchy wrote, "[…] the whole book feels final, elegiac – perhaps because for all the horror, it is so elegantly and calmly written; perhaps because This House of Grief completes so many arcs begun in Garner's previous works; perhaps because it is impossible to imagine it being done better".

Kate Atkinson wrote, "Helen Garner is an invaluable guide into harrowing territory and offers powerful and unforgettable insights.

[14] In October 2023, John Powers, NPR's pop culture critic, described the book thus: "Garner uses the case — and her reactions to it — to think about wounded masculinity, collapsing families, the theatricality of courtrooms and the unknowable mystery of human behavior.