Helen Garner’s Alienating Domesticity

The houses were full of what she described as “disciplined hippies.” There were single mothers with small kids, cooperative men, and boyfriends who’d overstayed their welcome. The tasks were divvied up equally. In the summertime, they would bundle up their towels and goggles and bike to the local pool. Under these communal arrangements, separated from her first husband and caring for their young child, the Australian writer Helen Garner wrote her debut novel, Monkey Grip. For a year, she sat at Melbourne’s State Library, moving around bits of her diary to produce what would become the book—a slanted vision of inner-city bohemia, about a young mother living in a Melbourne sharehouse, desperately in love with a scrawny heroin addict.