About MONKEY GRIP
The novel that launched the career of one of Australia's greatest writers, following the doomed infatuations of a young single mother fascinated by the excesses of Melbourne's late '70s counterculture.
The name Helen Garner enjoys almost universal fame. A master novelist, short story writer and journalist, Garner is best known for her frank, unsparing and complex portraits of Australian life, often taken from the pages of her own diaries and diaries. Now, in a newly available American edition, comes the disruptive debut that established Garner's masterful, 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 accompanied by her young daughter Gracie. When Nora falls in love with the flighty Javo, she finds herself trapped in her addiction. And as their tenuous relationship disintegrates, Nora struggles to wean herself from a love that seems impossible to live without.
When first published in 1977, Monkey Grip was both a sensation and a lightning rod. While some critics praised Garner's talent, many scorned her cruel depictions of the human body and all its filth, her frankness about sex, drugs, and the messiness of motherhood, and her unabashed use of her own life as a source of inspiration. Today, such criticism seems old-fashioned and blatantly sexist, and Monkey Grip is considered a modern masterpiece.
A seminal novel about Australia's turbulent 1970s and all that it entailed – community homes, music, friendships, children, love, drugs and sex – Monkey Grip now makes its long-awaited American debut .
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Helen Garner writes novels, stories, screenplays and non-fiction. In 2006 she was awarded the inaugural Melbourne Prize for Literature and in 2016 she won the prestigious Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Non-fiction. In 2019, she received the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. His books include Monkey Grip, The Children's Bach, Cosmo Cosmolino, The Spare Room, The First Stone, This House of Grief, Everywhere I Look, and his journals Yellow Notebook, One Day I'll Remember This and How to End a Story. .
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