www.antithesis.unimelb.edu.au
———————————————
The following text was originally published in
Déjà Vu: antiTHESIS Volume 17 (2007).
This digital version of the text is an
exact reproduction of the print version.
antiTHESIS is an annual journal of criticism and creative writing
edited by graduate students in the School of Culture and Communication
at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
For further information on the journal, please visit
www.antithesis.unimelb.edu.au
Déjà Vu | MARCH 2007
Alice Garner, the student
chronicles
Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006
$24.95, ISBN 978 0 52285 278 3
Melissa Petrakis
At this year's Melbourne Writers' Festival, I was interested to note Alice Garner would
be promoting her memoir the student chronicles. At the time I had not made the
connection between Alice and her literary mother, Helen Garner.
Melbourne-based and in my thirties, Alice is in fact more familiar to me than Helen;
familiar in the way people are who we have been repeatedly exposed to through
popular media. I knew her from the first of those violent “Speed Kills” TAC
advertisements, bloodied and calling out to “Tracey,” her dead friend. I knew her
from Love & Other Catastrophes, the low-budget film nominated for an AFI award
that went to Cannes. I knew her from TV series The Secret Life of Us.
Now aware of the family connection, it is hard to avoid comparisons with her
mother’s critically acclaimed novels. Helen’s texts from the late seventies and early
eighties are similarly set in an inner city Melbourne share house milieu and are also
essentially memoirs—or so it has been argued. Strong differences are immediately
apparent in the work of mother and daughter in tone and preoccupations, though.
Helen’s works are imbued with a feminist ideology and are a backdrop of drug use
and partner-swapping. The younger Garner assumes privacy and a steadfast
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antiTHESIS | VOL 17
monogamy for her protagonist-narrator. She takes on the guise of a personal telling
of facts rather than fiction and offers little-to-no soul searching or confusion, let
alone intrapersonal angst or interpersonal conflict.
I didn’t see the film version of Monkey Grip when it was released in 1982 (I
remember a promotional still for the film, though, in the first movie magazine I
bought. Of course, at the age of ten I bought the magazine for E.T. the Extra-
Terrestrial). Seeing the film now, in the context of Alice’s memoir, Alice Garner
seems almost pre-destined to at some point compare her own twenty-something
experiences with those of her mother’s generation. With an 11-year old Alice playing
the role of the daughter Gracie in the film version of the book, there is a strange
blurring of reality and fiction for the viewer. This is made more complex by the sense
that Alice’s Gracie is the most balanced character in the ensemble; the calmest, the
most mature and, with a sense of humour, the best prepared for life’s ups and
downs. She seems above the petty domestic scuffles. This particularly comes to bear
when Gracie gives her film mother relationship advice later in the film.
On the other hand, discomfort with the lifestyle choices of her parents’ generation is
evident. Earlier in the film we see young Gracie at the piano, practisng scales, while
the aftermath of infidelity is being dissected in the kitchen by her screen mother,
playing a version or creation of her real-life mother, trying to smooth the waters for
a jilted male. The mother says ‘It was easy to begin so it’s easy to end’. Her words
seem hollow. The unhappy man replies ‘easy for who?’ Throughout this scene the
young Gracie at the piano hears everything, monitors everything; seeming to wish
she wasn’t.
The memoir the student chronicles – small ‘t’, small ‘s’, small ‘c’ – commences with
Alice ‘shell-shocked’ (p. xi), on the high of the promoting of Love & Other
Catastrophes at the Cannes Film Festival, mingling with the likes of Hugh Grant and
meeting Al Pacino aboard his yacht. She chooses to leave all this behind for Arachon
Bay, France, and oyster farmers. She is, in the prologue, simultaneously ingénue
actress from Oz and intrepid young girl PhD student. This is to be the tension for our
narrator throughout the text.
Déjà Vu | MARCH 2007
Alice takes us from finishing high school and a professional theatre role as Anya in
The Cherry Orchard at seventeen, through university studies in Philosophy and
History and sharing a house with three other young women and a revolving door of
different men occupying the ‘cupboard-like room’ (20). There is much to enjoy here
that is evocative: a love affair with the Baillieu library, the main library on campus
(44); watching TV shows of the time, like L.A. Law and Twin Peaks, with friends on a
rented set (19); a working holiday in a beloved and dreamed of distant country not
being all one had imagined (93); observing in friends that the wisdom of
conservative career choices has both perks and trade-offs (114); the challenges of
teaching and of living up to the ghosts of role models (149); realising upon closer
inspection that the mythologies you have carried around with you all your life about
your parents may not be accurate (156).
It seems that Alice’s training and interests as a history scholar have strongly
influenced her approach to memoir. She uses letter and diary excerpts from the time
to be accurate in depicting her thinking and events. She conducts interviews with
friends and former housemates. She seems painstaking to the point of painful in her
attempt to be balanced, indeed generous, in drawing portraits—to in no way be
critical of anyone. The harshest comment made is that a short-term male housemate
who borrowed a mattress slept on it without a sheet, his aroma lingering when he
left (21).
It would also seem that there is a point of contention left unresolved in the student
chronicles. The text posits that Alice’s generation of university attendees, now in
their mid-thirties, were a different but not lesser breed to their parents. Alice
suggests further that being conservative and almost nerdy in an approach to study is
about a dedication to higher learning. The previous generation, in contrast, seems
fuelled by philosophical positions, passions, and wildly experimental rebellion. Then,
about halfway through the book (70), Alice inexplicably notes both her generation
and the current one as embodying apathy. For me, this ambivalence and seeming
lack of clarity about her and my own generation’s self-perception is ultimately the
most interesting rumination from the book I was left with.
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