Monkey Grip

Oh, Switzy.

Leah finally read Monkey Grip.

So for those of you who are coming to Garnerama, or if you're not sure whether or not you should come because you haven't read any Garner, Brisbane gets Monkey Grip.

brisbane gets like the families which is the sort of we did it did it thematically because it would not be in the spirit of helen garnett to split things between fiction and non-fiction that misunderstands her body of work um anyway brisbane get the families brisbane gets monkey group um and if you were going to start anywhere with garnett start with monkey group um joe um I am Nana Taguruk by Tasma Walton.

She's Joe says it broke me.

I have not heard of either of those books.

So love that for you.

Janine also finally read monkey grip.

You are obsessed with that.

I love Radio National book countdowns.

That is one thing people know about me.

[laughs]

Hmm.

All right.

After the break, the French protests and why the Australian media coverage looks so different to coverage from European outlets, plus our take on the ABC's top 100 Australian books countdown.

[gentle music]

What's your next selection, Stuart Coupe?

My next selection, when we talk about being taken into a particular place, is the first novel by Helen Garner, which is Monkey Grip, which came out in 1977.

And... is such an evocative book about Melbourne in that era.

And it just, you know, right from the opening couple of paragraphs, which set this scene of share households and people dropping in and there never been enough tables at the chair and someone's perched there, you know, they got their dinner on a plate on their knee on a couch, all of those sort of things, you know, you're immediately... taken into the Fitzroy Carlton world of the 1970s.

And I was really taken with this sophisticated world that happened in Melbourne.

Yeah.

You know, people like the characters in Monkey Grip didn't seem to exist in, of course they existed in Adelaide, but they didn't in my head exist.

You know, this was another level of kind of lifestyle and something that I very much, you know, I kind of aspired to.

Um, why don't we talk about books? Which icon of Australian literature published her first book that year, and why was it so massive?

Yeah, so Helen Garner's first novel, Monkey Grip, was published in 1977, and it was a real kind of milestone novel in Australian literature.

It was a book about co- a countercultural Melbourne, like people who were living in share houses, um, trying to find different ways to live.

You know, trying to live outside the kind of nuclear family or the mum, dad, and two children.

And- You know, it was a, a novel written by a feminist and about feminists and published by a women's publishing house, um, McPhee Gribble.

And it was sort of, as I said, a, a, a book about trying to carve out a way of living that could give men and women more freedom, but the immense difficulties in doing that at the same time.

Um, and I think it's a nice little detail that, um, Helen Garner had a daughter, and, and the character in the book, um, uh, you know, who is sort of based on, on her, also has a daughter in the book.

She said that she wrote part of the novel with the support of the Supporting Mothers Benefit, which is a kind of really interesting...

And between the two of them, they discovered and supported so many great Australian writers.

Uh, the story is that Helen Garner, as a school teacher, arrived in their office one day with this manuscript called Monkey Grip.

The rest is history.

Uh, s- a similar sort of story, Tim Winton's Cloudstreet, uh, Puberty Blues.

Hilary spoke with David Marr here on Late Night Live in February last year on the 50th anniversary of McPhee Gribble, and here she is with the story of when a young Helen Garner pulled up on her bicycle with her first manuscript.

We were in a bunker by this stage, it was the beginning of our second year, when Helen Garner showed up with Monkey Grip, and she said, "I think I might have written a novel.

Will you read it and tell me if I have?" And we, of course, went home that night, both of us with a copy each, and came in the next day and said, "We've got to do this."

How much editing did Helen's work require?

Yeah.

And that, I have also read Monkey Grip as well, but many, many years ago and my memories of it are pretty faded.

It was sort of during that period at university where I was, I didn't grow up in a house of books and I was catching up.

I felt like this really, I don't know about whether that's been the case with you guys, but I felt this real pressure to read all of the sort of the canon but also the really sort of formative Australian books.

Yeah.

She's a novelist, a short story writer, a screenwriter and a journalist.

Her first novel was Monkey Grip, published in 1977.

She was quickly deemed an original voice on the Australian literary scene.