The winner of our ‘talk up your fave book’ contest - thank you very much to everyone who entered - is Another Outspoken Femail, proprietor of Health Philosophy Politics and Other Rants, who contributed this wonderful post:
My favourite book has long fallen from grace. The author toppled from her inner city pedestal. This is not a literary classic. I don’t mind that the grammar is at times dodgy. I love Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip.
I had flirted with it on the shelf of many bookshops in Sydney, finally buying it early in 1982 as I was about to take flight from the city. I took this tale of torrid Melbourne life with me to Wellington, a rather squeaky clean town at the time. I had only been to the place Garner wrote of briefly, but I could smell the scent of sprinklers on hot asphalt and taste the bacon eaten on the back doorstep of the ‘old brown house a mile from the city’. She wrote of elation and pain, what every young, and not so young, woman knows of love. I dived right in at the deep end and emersed myself in her world.
I now live in Melbourne but it’s a long time since brandy alexanders were 50 cents a shot and most of the old haunts are long gone. I have resided in rambling shared houses in many of the suburbs Nora cried in and torn down the streets late at nights on my own clunky bicycle. Fortunately I didn’t fall in love with a junky, but that is the vicarious joy of fiction. Thanks to Monkey Grip, I don’t need to.
Whenever I am sad I read it. Whenever I feel my life is dull I read it. Like an old, worn t-shirt or vegemite on toast, this is what comforts me during the bumpy bits in my life and a novel any loftier just would not do.
AOF, a LibraryThing membership is on its way to you this evening. Hope you enjoy it!
Well judged! Good choice.
I am humbled and honoured and having had a few christmas eve champagnes, its a nice gift to come home to.
Yes, it is a good choice. I remember feeling a stirring of emotions when I read it the first time.
Now I will have to find Monkey Grip in the dark recesses of one of my bookcases, which should take me to the New Year, and read it again.
Well done, another outspoken female.
Yeah, great choice - it resonates with me as well. When it came out I was living a similar kind of lifestyle, although in Sydney. At the time I thought that Garner captured that reality perfectly. Haven’t read it since, although I think I’ll see if the local library has a copy now that LP and AOF have brought it back to mind.
Wasn’t it a stinker of a Xmas Day? It was over 35 here in the Granite Belt - Brisso must’ve been horrendous!
It was a wunnerful xmas day here in melbourne. Christ knows where the granite belt might be, but this is an excellent winner of the award. Good book too. And good fillum. And excellent opening sequence for all connoisseurs of screen erotics (from memory).
Well deserved. My word yes. This little girl is very funny - for a girl.
I’m sending you ninety-nine cents. -Being true to SAVERS policy: there’s no such thing as a dollar.
Toodle-oo.
R.H.
???
Must have been too much protracted holiday cheer among some commenters?
Enough holiday cheer, and everyone’s funny.
Yeah, all right, Monkey Grip is, after all, the one ‘contemporary’ novel out of Australia I was reading when my own immigration adventure began, and Helen Garner will always have a place in my literary heart as a result, as will any who also recognise her accomplishment. I probably should have gone with Patrick White’s Voss in the first place, though it mightn’t have gotten me anywhere. Know thy audience, I suppose, no dimishment meant towards any outspoken females (specific or several). Congratulations. It is a fine book.
Movie’s not bad either!
It’s not much of a book. Superficial.
But she’s an honest writer. Love and romance.
I apologise for that. Some parts of Monkey Grip are very good.