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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.
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.
137
I’d always wanted to be around clever people, to be playful with other clever people. My first husband had been involved with a radical theater group that was quite important in Melbourne, and I’d been involved in the feminist arm of it, although I was always a bit of a tourist in that world. But then he was out at night a lot, and I was home holding down the fort with my daughter, and I started to get lonely and sad.
My mother’s life, the life of a married woman with children, had never really appealed to me. It had dawned on me when I was quite young that my mother could never go out for more than about three hours at a time. She always had to be there at lunchtime, at dinnertime. I’d grown up as the eldest child in a family of five girls and one boy, and everybody was always squabbling and looking at the others to see if they were getting more—counting the strawberries in one another’s bowls. I remember it hitting me when I was about fourteen that our mother was in a sort of cage.
I’d always wanted to be around clever people, to be playful with other clever people. My first husband had been involved with a radical theater group that was quite important in Melbourne, and I’d been involved in the feminist arm of it, although I was always a bit of a tourist in that world. But then he was out at night a lot, and I was home holding down the fort with my daughter, and I started to get lonely and sad.
My mother’s life, the life of a married woman with children, had never really appealed to me. It had dawned on me when I was quite young that my mother could never go out for more than about three hours at a time. She always had to be there at lunchtime, at dinnertime. I’d grown up as the eldest child in a family of five girls and one boy, and everybody was always squabbling and looking at the others to see if they were getting more—counting the strawberries in one another’s bowls. I remember it hitting me when I was about fourteen that our mother was in a sort of cage.
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INTERVIEWER
The ending of the novel—that list of paragraphs all beginning with “And … ”—is strikingly beautiful.
GARNER
I suppose it’s the book thinking about itself—about what is going to happen in the world after it stops being a book. I didn’t want the book to fade out. I wanted it to feel like the way Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Two-and Three-Part Inventions—the way he flings the final notes away with force.
<3
INTERVIEWER
The ending of the novel—that list of paragraphs all beginning with “And … ”—is strikingly beautiful.
GARNER
I suppose it’s the book thinking about itself—about what is going to happen in the world after it stops being a book. I didn’t want the book to fade out. I wanted it to feel like the way Glenn Gould plays Bach’s Two-and Three-Part Inventions—the way he flings the final notes away with force.
<3