Smack habit, love habit–what’s the difference? They can both kill you.
from Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

I was totally inoculated from the social turbulence of the 1970s, married to a seminary student and then pastor, completing my education while working ten or twenty hours a week in church youth programs. I didn’t even drink until I was twenty-eight and had a glass of wine. No sexual liberation or experimentation with drugs for me.

A college professor told our class that he predicted a new Victorian Age was going to come after this age of freedom, that the pendulum always swings back and forth. He was surely correct. For the Seventies also saw the birth of evangelical Christianity, and I knew people who only listened to the Christian radio stations and shopped with Christian businesses.

Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, drawn from her diary entries, illuminates the Seventies counterculture world of sexual freedom, women’s liberation, and drugs. Her Nora is compelled to break from the old paradigm where women used their wiles to snag a husband. She sleeps with numerous men, giving or responding to casual invitations. And yet she and her female friends struggle with jealousy and desire a deep bond with the men they love.

Nora loves Javo, an actor who becomes addicted to cocaine. Even when drugs ruin his looks and comes between them, she can’t find the same connection with other men. Javo leaves and returns. He bonds and closes off. He steals and returns to be healed. Nora can’t sever her feelings for him.

Nora has a daughter who sees and knows too much, who Nora loves but will happily send off with acquaintances for a bit of freedom. Every time Gracie sees Javo with a needle, she cries out a warning, a child too wise for her age. It is shattering.

The women in the story share camaraderie, even when sharing lovers, clucking at the feckless men while acknowledging their necessity to their happiness. Nora sweeps and prepares food, ministers to Javo when he is withdrawing or ill. In many ways, she is still stuck in the traditional role of wife and helpmate, her freedom limited, while Javo and the other men come and go and take without commitment.

Nora tells her story with directness, without sentiment. Characters float in and out, often without context and without back story. Her bohemian lifestyle does not bring joy, but loneliness.

The air is deep, deep blue, one star. I feel a hot day coming when this night is over. I’m full of restlessness. Not lonely, exactly–my head is racing wit ideas. But it is that old treacherous feeling that real life is happening somewhere else, and I’m left out.
from Monkey Grip by Helen Garner

As foreign as Nora’s life is to me, as a character I relate to her. Her searching, her desire for connection, for meaning. Her addiction to love and her need for autonomy. Social mores and conventions flux and flow, but human nature remains the same.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book. ( )

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The novel that launched the career of one of Australia’s greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young, single mother, enthralled by the excesses of Melbourne's late-70s counterculture

The name Helen Garner commands near-universal acclaim. A master novelist, short-story writer, and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing, and intricate portraits of Australian life, often drawn from the pages of her own journals and diaries. Now, in a newly available US edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful and quietly radical literary voice.

Set in Australia in the late 1970s, Monkey Grip follows single mother and writer Nora as she navigates the tumultuous cityscape of Melbourne’s bohemian underground, often with her young daughter Gracie in tow. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she becomes snared in the web of his addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself off a love that feels impossible to live without.

When it first published in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised the upstart Garner for her craft, many scorned her gritty depictions of the human body and all its muck, her frankness about sex and drugs and the mess of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as inspiration. Today, such criticism feels old-fashioned and glaringly gendered, and Monkey Grip is considered a modern masterpiece.

A seminal novel of Australia’s turbulent 1970s and all it entailed—communal households, music, friendships, children, love, drugs, and sex— Monkey Grip now makes its long-overdue American debut.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Novels belong to times and places. This novel is absolutely a product of its time...the 1970s...and place, settler-colonial Australia. Now we are fifty years (close enough) on from that time, we see it very differently. The term "settler colonial" as an example had not been articulated in any but the most ardently leftist circles and is now much more a part of the cultural conversation. What Garner has to say about a liberated woman of the 1970s hits very differently now than it did then. Nora’s descent into sexual obsession and drug abuse was transgressive in a different way. Now, in a conservative social landscape developed in reaction to that bright bohemian moment, Nora seems appallingly neglectful, pretty much criminally culpable for her treatment of Gracie as an expendable accessory to her own life. We think that differently about children and their needs. Thank goodness.

A point that was clear then that we of the 2020s often seem to ignore is that Gracie...of necessity...has a dad. Nora is living her own life without so much as a thought for Gracie. And so, I remind is all in our desire to tut over this, is Gracie’s dad. In the 1970s that was so ordinary an outcome that nothing whatever is made of it, nor is Javo’s hostile indifference to anyone’s needs except his own. He is, after all, A Man. Nora, by the end of the tale, is the only sufferer for her actions. Her resentful neglect of Gracie, product of an unhappy stab at marriage, really stood out for me as she simultaneously pined after the job of riding herd on Javo of the wild blue eyes and the clearly terminal smack (heroin, for the youths who might read this) addiction. As always, the inconvenient thing about children is that they need meals, clothes, baths, every day. Junkies like the adult-but-younger Javo, in contrast, can be left in their own mess, and no one does a double-take.

The reason this book sprang out at people back in the day was that it was still very much Not Done for a woman to write about women’s desires for sex, and about the bright shining fact that the reason drug culture took hold was that taking drugs feels really good. It gets a user out of their doubtless boring and routine life. That it also takes them over and ruins that boring tedious necessary engagement with living one’s life slowly emerges as Nora stays focused on herself and her addictions to sex and drugs. The shock value of this, then, was that it was a woman writing about it without stuffy moralizing and overt message-making. Yes, she has been in this out-of-control relaationship but she does come to know it must, and is at the, end. Nora does not ever think about the impact of any of this on Gracie.

I do not pretend to like Nora, or to think I would voluntarily pick up a book about her. I’m glad that I read Monkey Grip because the prose is terrific...elliptical, imprecise, and poetic...and the fact that this is based off Garner’s own life is much better known now. This adds a depth of field to my reading of the nearly plotless events that occur. The fact that Garner spent her energy in this difficult-to-sell way, then transmuted that sort-of wasted life into a work of very loud art in a very beige cultural landscape, made me admire her for her honesty, and for her clarity of purpose in writing it as a novel. She could have written a mea-culpa memoir, and been forgotten in a year.

What we get instead is a book that, for its story and its storyteller, was a loud BANG! of brightly-colored paint in that very beige cultural landscape. It would take over a decade for Australian writers to follow Helen Garner into the Fitzroy Baths and soak some of the settler-colonial stiffness out of their storytelling muscles. ( )

Garners prose is just magic. She could write a cleaning manual and I’d give it 5 stars. The trials and tribulations of drug culture is always a rough read, but Garner does it in a way like no other. I wish I’d read this in my youth instead of Kerouac and Bukowski. I know I’ll read it again, just to lose myself in that visceral writing of hers. ( )

I read this book when I was a teenager - my edition was quite long, and I was intimidated by it, but I read it within days.

Helen Garner is a writer that I love, and this the first book I ever read by her.

I liked it because it was honest. It talked about sex, about drugs, drug use, about menstruation, about relationships, about female friendships - and it did so openly.

This book is vulnerable.

It's actually taken from parts of Garner's personal diaries, (I'm still not sure why it's fiction and not a memoir, because it would work either way), but this is a wonderful testament to feminism in the 1970's.

I loved reading about the hush of Melbourne and found this a really engrossing read. ( )

Almost perfect.

Some time back I read "The First Stone" which just dazzled me with its power to evoke a complicated and unjust situation. Later I read "Joe Cinque's Consolation" which I also enjoyed. So, it was time to read the book that started it all, namely "Monkey Grip".

Without the benefit of any introduction, save Penguin's assertion that this is an "Aussie Classic," I jumped in and started right way to love Garner's evocation of time, place and people. I waited for the plot to develop. In vain.

I realised after a while, that I was searching for something that wasn't there. And that this was intentional. So, once I allowed myself just to go with Garner's flow, I found the unrelenting rhythm something in which to immerse oneself. Let it wash me along. Into deeper emotional waters. Frustration. Sadness. Love. Loss. Cinema verite (where's my 'acute'?).

In summary: It's like a musical tone poem. Enjoy its richness. Don't look for an ending. ( )