In a 1978 review of Helen Garner’s novel Monkey Grip, critic 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.
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 recently “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.
Angel’s debut novel, The Trapeze Act – which won the 2018 Barbara Jefferis Award – drew from her younger life as a circus performer. Its influence on Where I Slept is found in its eclectic characters, namely creative types such as dancers, photographers and visual artists (as well as its “flotsam and jetsam” of lecherous, clingy men). Nothing grandiose propels the plot, though there’s no feeling of anything needing to. Each moment rolls into the next, as things do when unmoored and young, with a voyeuristic allure – a friend braving a Prince Albert piercing (look it up); the narrator trying heroin with two junkie housemates, taking acid and playing toy instruments in the street.
Where I Slept is self-aware enough not to romanticise bohemian living, however; Angel appears more intent on stripping it of its sentimentalised veneer. Vacuous politics abound – white people appropriating dreadlocks, activists shoplifting from op-shops because “stealing from organised religion is practically a virtue”. Yet the author catalogues these without didactic moralism, sifting through the grit to reveal moments of connection and self-actualisation. One of its strengths, too, is its insight into the cyclical nature of people contending with financial insecurity and homelessness, as well as a recurring undercurrent of trauma. As the narrator quips, “The details vary but the wound is shared.”
The novel speaks unflinchingly to the early dawn of adulthood, when a person’s nascent worldview is propped up by half-formed values that don’t always stand up to scrutiny. The narrator – flawed, eccentric and capricious – discards her “defunct selves” literally in garbage bags (“books I’ve read, ill-fitting clothes, half-full bottles of shampoo”) as she sleeps with various artists “in the hope they will transmit a sense of vocation to me”. The young woman’s desire for a creative life never feels transcendent, but it’s still authentic: a relatable, listless search for meaning rather than any pretension of sophisticated pursuit.
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Eschewing adornment and cliche, Angel writes with a poet’s precision, and she evokes no character as viscerally as the places they rest their heads: dilapidated refuges from society that creek “like a rigging on a ship clinking against a mast”, where “fat blowflies circle tardily beneath the crumbling ceiling roses”. The author offers dogged detail, yet the writing remains buoyed and often funny throughout, with moments of singular, quiet beauty. Visually, it has its arresting moments;certain turns of phrase evoke the muted tones of an Edward Hopper painting. “A gunmetal sky broods over factories, highways, electrical towers and powerlines. In the distance ahead loom the grey castles of the city.”
Passing references are made to the French writer Jean Genet, whose earlier life was spent as wayfaring petty criminal. In 2018, the artist Patti Smith wrote of Genet’s autofictional work The Thief’s Journal, which stemmed from his journals during his prison days: “He is the transparent observer reclaiming the suffering and exhilaration of his own follies, trials, and evolution.” Angel’s work – also cleaved from life – is an immersive, elevated chronicle of her own suffering and exhilaration, offering an engaging protagonist through which unsentimental truths are revealed about a life lived on the margins.
It may lack the interior richness or observational shrewdness of Garner’s Monkey Grip, but Where I Slept similarly renders the unfamiliar recognisable – a world completely unknown to many. It’s not a portrait of a young artist as much as of art-as-living, even when art simply means being alert to the world. As the narrator quips: “From now on, everything I do will be a sort of happening, whether anyone’s watching or not.”
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Where I Slept by Libby Angel is out now through Text publishing
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