Tag: Debauchery

The Australian author Helen Garner’s first novel, Monkey Grip, published in 1977, and her third, Children’s Bach, published in 1984—both recently reissued in the United States—are considered classics in Australia, and they really are fantastic books. They’re also likely to freak you out. This is not because they’re full of sex and drugs—who worries about that anymore?—but because they seem nonchalant, even indifferent, to a truth we hold sacred today, which is that children should be shielded