The Startling Candor of Helen Garner

newyorker.com

23 points·Thevet··6 comments

I'm not sure if anyone outside of old Melbourne people would understand a book as fabulous as Monkey Grip - a story about a woman in love with a heroin addicted young man who she adores.

Maybe even lots of Melbourne people wouldn't understand it.

But for me this is the essence of Helen Garner - painfully raw relationships of young adults in Melbourne in the mid to late 20th century.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/634141

Funnily enough just finished monkey wrench last week. Dark and hard going at times, but enjoyable. As someone who has never lived in Melbourne but spent formative years in Brisbane, Glasgow and Dublin, I would say it's fairly relatable (within that very specific cultural milieux!)

Glasgow, Dublin are great analogues for Melbourne in many ways, especially in that period of the 1970's - 1980's.

https://archive.is/IR4ud

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_First_Stone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helen_Garner

Ah, Helen Garner.

An incredible writer. But The First Stone was an incredibly annoying book.

Even in the 1990s, the idea that it was excusable in any way for the head of an educational institution to make a pass at an 18-year-old undergrad living in the community he managed was nonsensical.

Garner spent the entire book dancing eloquently round this.

Disclaimer: I lived in the institution the other side of the road a few years later, and met people who were peripherally involved on both sides of the incident then.

"excusable" is a shallow reading of the book. It's far more interesting than that, and I would say much more interesting than say Mamet's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleanna_(play) which dealt with a similar theme. Also written around the same time. Fictional but no doubt based on personal knowledge of similar incidents.

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