In the early seventies, when my daughter was two, I moved into the first of these hippie houses—­what were called communal houses—in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. It was while I was living there that I had an affair with a guy who was addicted to heroin, and as it rolled on over a year or so, the chaos of it became painful and obsessive-­making. I’d been keeping a diary for a couple of years and was enjoying it—­I needed to write it, and I was learning to write through it, by means of it—­and as this relationship grew in complexity, as my life thickened up and became more eventful, I could see that my experiences were forming themselves into the kind of curve that we call a “story.” Story is a chunk of life with a bend in it, and I could feel this one coming. I suddenly thought, Maybe I could write about this while it’s still happening, as it’s coming into its bend.

I decided to look back in the diary to the moment when I first fell in love with the guy. I skipped over all the boring stuff, and transcribed the interesting bits into another notebook. I wanted to see if I could shape it into something. For about a year in the mid-­seventies I sat every day in the state library with my two notebooks and kind of blindly thrashed along. So the truth is that Monkey Grip really was my diary, with links between passages and with some passages expanded.