![]() ![]() It never occurred to us to teach the children to eat with a knife and fork. There were never enough chairs for us all to sit up at the meal table one or two of us always sat on the floor or on the kitchen step, plate on knee. In the old brown house on the corner, a mile from the middle of the city, we ate bacon for breakfast every morning of our lives. To me, it’s a perfect opening, one with such astonishing beauty I committed to the next 320 pages for this first paragraph alone: Published in 1977, the novel was Garner’s first and is now considered a classic of Australian literature. of Speculation with The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Unless by Carol Shields The Millstone by Margaret Drabble and again a few weeks ago, when I sat on a wooden bench outside a coffee shop, and cracked open Monkey Grip by Helen Garner. It doesn’t happen often that the first few sentences of a book will utterly engross me, but it happened, memorably, with the first lines of Jenny Offill’s Dept. ![]() “All of Moby-Dick is here in this first paragraph,” he said. I consider it then one of the great strokes of luck in my life that the professor announced we’d be discussing the first paragraph of the novel for the next three hours. I was dating one person and in love with another and Captain Ahab’s obsession couldn’t compete with my own. When I arrived to my college senior seminar in American Literature, I hadn’t read the first half of Moby-Dick. On Beginnings: A Close Read of Helen Garner’s “Monkey Grip” ![]()
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