In a foreword to the book’s re-release, Charlotte Wood reflects on the innocence and molten anger that so divided critics
When I think of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip I think of blinding sunlight and suburban swimming pools. 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. Like all Garner’s work, it also makes me examine who I am now.
Monkey Grip is Garner’s first book, released in 1977 by then fledgling independent Melbourne publisher McPhee Gribble. 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. 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[ing] notions of literary decorum”.
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