My claim is that Garner’s firing therefore ironically heralds the belated emergence of a period of Australian literary history in which the new diversity of literary fiction cannot be fully comprehended, as Mark McGurl argues in his seminal study of postwar American fiction The Program Era (2009), without close attention ‘to the increasingly intimate relation between literary production and the practices of higher education’ (ix).' (Publication abstract) Single Motherhood as a Site for Feminist Reimagination in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and 'Other People’s Children' Jane Scerri, I go on to show how her subsequent hiring by various universities in a succession of writer-in-residencies left related yet distinct marks on her taut minimalist masterpiece, The Children’s Bach (1984). This essay argues that the terms of Garner’s firing inform the countercultural realism of her first novel Monkey Grip (1977), which is unabashedly fluent in, and indeed narratively yearns for, various forms of the four-letter contraband that got her sacked in the first place. 'The city of Melbourne churns at the centre of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, sustaining the plot of a book lauded as the ‘quintessential Melbourne novel.’ The streets of the inner north on which the story unfolds still exist: Delbridge Street down through the ‘green tunnel’ of Edinburgh Gardens still leads to Fitzroy Baths where one might still dive into the cool blue ‘aqua profonda.’ Yet they also never existed.' (Introduction) Helen Garner’s Education Joseph Steinberg,Īustralian Literary Studies, October vol.ģ 2021 Abstract 'On the 14th of December 1972, a schoolteacher named Helen Garner found herself fired. This last point had come to seem like the most vulgar misprision by the time I wrote a full-dress defence of Garner in Judith Brett's Meanjin in the mid 1980s.' (Publication abstract) Where Is Easey Street? Reading Garner’s Monkey Grip Today Lucy Benjamin,

Yes, and along with this, there was the persistent accusation that she had simply published her diaries and served them up as fiction.

Indeed, there were critics such as the late Peter Pierce who said that Helen Garner had just talked dirty and called it realism. The initial response to Monkey Grip was a response to a literary brave new world that was also the translation of something real. In 1997 there was that shock of recognition that someone had succeeded in re-creating inner-urban Melbourne, the ' aqua profunda' part of the Fitzroy pool, the tumult and tumbling from bed to bed of shared housing, the heartache of loving a junkie. 'It's 45 years since Helen Garner published Monkey Grip and perhaps a while later that people realised how fine a writer she was.

Helen Garner, Robert Hughes and the Mystery of Nonfiction Peter Craven,

Monkey grip book