In a 1978 review of Helen Garner’s novel Monkey Grip, Veronica Swartz wrote how the author had captured “a world completely unknown to many who yet are, in physical terms, so close to it”. That world was mid-1970s Melbourne, where a counterculture of communal living, open sexuality, creative expression and drug taking was emerging. The novel used fictional characters, but, contentiously for the time, it was born out of Garner’s experiences with her friends, an elevation of the diaries she kept.
The award-winning author and poet Libby Angel’s Where I Slept is a natural descendant: a work of biographical fiction, or autofiction, set in Melbourne in the 1990s. Similarly informed by her diaries, as Angel has mentioned in interviews, the novel is narrated by an unnamed young woman “spat out” from university with a failed degree. She’s restless, searching for a life of creative gristle, but what this means exactly is unclear. Flitting between share houses, squats and friends’ couches – first in regional Victoria and then Melbourne – she begins scrawling “crude Artline obscurities” over any object she can and calls herself a poet.
