![]() Nora likes to spend her time reading books by Virginia Woolf or Henry James, writing her diaries and staying out all night at parties. “Monkey Grip” encapsulates the tension between responsibility and freedom that women have always had to negotiate. In an essay she wrote of her “speechless desolation” when contemplating the constraints of her own mother’s life. Her novel is particularly astute about the ambiguous feelings elicited by mothering, a theme that has been picked up anew by female writers in the 21st century. Inspired by Jean Rhys and Doris Lessing, Ms Garner captured some of the realities of womanhood. The novel was adapted into a film, and later she displayed similar lyricism and directness in acclaimed narrative non-fiction books about a murder trial (“Joe Cinque’s Consolation”), sexual harassment at a university college (“The First Stone”) and a devastating family-violence case (“This House of Grief”). In 1978 Ms Garner became the first woman to win the National Book Council Award, a prestigious Australian literary gong. Both Patrick White and Raymond Carver were fans. Some reviewers scoffed at the book, claiming she had merely turned her diaries into a novel, but others recognised that it was a trailblazing piece of what is now called autofiction, the transmuting of personal experience into stories. ![]()
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