Riding on a fast train through France, I read Helen Garner’s novel Monkey Grip. Set in the mid-70s, it’s the story of the relationship between a woman and her junkie boyfriend. It’s fascinating to read now as a portrayal of the times.
The main character and her friends are firm in their ideological stance: it’s all about free love; monogamy is an outdated concept; suburban conformity is terribly uncool.
Garner is an expert chronicler of ironies and subtleties. The women stick to their ideology, and they suffer from it. The free love makes them jealous; the junkie’s behaviour is a nightmare. Sexual freedom seems aimless and occasionally destructive.
Garner’s main character is a solo mother, and since parenting is a bourgeois construct, she doesn’t do much of it. It’s interesting to see child neglect portrayed as a social stance.
There must be a middle way.
In southern France, tourists are photographing Ferraris, Aston Martins, a Bentley shaped like a Batmobile. A woman and her daughters are escorted by bodyguards from a tank-like Rolls-Royce. The elder daughter actually has her nose in the air as if, in her adolescent naivety, she has absorbed her mother’s intense, snooty self-consciousness and believes she’s above the plebs.
Monkey Grip’s girl character clings to the back of the pushbike as her stoned Mum pedals through 70s Melbourne. In 2025, the little princess turns up her nose as she follows the hired muscle into the beach club. Each has her identity shaped by Maman. The job of each is to battle Maman’s version of her. What to take from Maman and what to leave behind, how to fill in the outline, become solid, authentic, real.
On a slow train in Italy, I read about Jeff Bezos’s Venice wedding. The garish festivities included a foam party. The guests frolicked in bathing suits among soap bubbles shot out of a cannon.
What are they, 6 years old? You can be clever enough to become an American oligarch, while also being a sociopath, feckless moron and oaf.
Intelligence is a complex concept. I find a message sent by my late brother. Recalling childhood, he wrote to me, of our mother, that when she told me I was “less intelligent”, he was ashamed. He said that in his childish mind he was reeling from the worst bullying he’d ever observed. I think about this. I recall my father shooting me down when I’d suggested the solution to a puzzle. He not only corrected me, he was strident, loud, incredulous. I thought he was possibly wrong but fell silent. I was 12.
In my adolescent naivety, arguing with Maman, I sometimes looked at her as if she were unbelievably stupid. She bounced back by informing me I was an intellectual dud. I wonder if it might be useful, to grow up being told you’re thick. I recall a comical friend at school, a boy who always came top of English. He told me, “My IQ’s so low it should be a struggle for me to walk.”
I was as moronic as he was, so it was a nice surprise when law school didn’t seem all that hard.
On Bastille Day, we watch the fireworks exploding over the waterfront. The rockets go off like ideas, in great bursts, exhilarating and brash. The echo rebounds, booming off the cliffs. Walking back in the dark under the moon, it occurs to me what my parents valued most when I was growing up: intelligence.
Dozing on the train, I think about the psychotherapist I used to see. A radio plays an 80s pop song about the Berlin Wall, Nikita by Elton John. She makes a joke, and I wake up laughing.
