But I don’t think I harbour any special romance about the era. I’m aware of the perils of nostalgia here: the bike rides to the pool, dinking the kids on the back, the singing in the car, the handwritten notes left on kitchen tables in place of phone messages – all these signifiers of a simpler, slower existence – could be helping to colour this world as benign. For all the shiftlessness, Nora and her friends are passionately engaged in each other’s lives. A contemporary book set in this milieu, with these characters living guiltlessly for their addictions, would also be soaked in nihilism – boredom, at the very least. Nora’s young daughter Gracie is dragged from junkie house to pub gig to late-night kebab shop, up and down hitchhikers’ highways, wearily (and wisely) advising her mother on her love affairs before she’s out of kindergarten, while Nora’s own life is governed by her erotic devotion to Javo, the novels she reads and the I Ching.Īnd yet I see also a childlike innocence in Javo and Nora’s haphazard bohemian lives.

To this middle-aged self, the lives of Nora and Javo and their friends seem outrageously rootless, drifting from gig to gig and house to house, taking possession of each other’s clothes and drugs and cars and lovers without anything as bourgeois as asking permission. Rereading the novel now, deep in middle age, I discover myself to be alarmingly conservative, full of stern judgments of the novel’s young protagonists, finding a finger-wagging priggishness in me I didn’t know I had. Photograph: James Broadwayīut reading Monkey Grip is not all about a visit to the past. Readers loved Monkey Grip, but critics were divided and often vicious, establishing a pattern that would recur for the rest of Garner’s writing life. As Bernadette Brennan writes in her superb biography A Writing Life: Helen Garner and Her Work, the publication of Monkey Grip was a watershed moment for our culture, charting “the complex female experiences of motherhood, sexuality and desire, within the changing social contexts of the seventies, and … explod notions of literary decorum”. Everything about the partnership between Hilary McPhee, Diana Gribble and Garner, all three aged in their 30s, was to become iconic, for it represented the wresting of Australian literature away from the grip of conservative old men into the hands of radical young women. Monkey Grip is Garner’s first book, released in 1977 by then fledgling independent Melbourne publisher McPhee Gribble. Like all Garner’s work, it also makes me examine who I am now. Is there an Australian who doesn’t know the particular tough pleasure of lying on a threadbare towel on concrete, nestling your pliant young body into that hard, baking warmth? This book makes me remember the person I was in my youth.

W hen I think of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip I think of blinding sunlight and suburban swimming pools.

Monkey grip book