Australian fiction writer Helen Garner was retrospectively considered to be a grunge lit author, due to the characters and subject matter of her 1977 novel Monkey Grip: an inner-city single mother living in a destructive relationship with a heroin addict, amidst a circle of mostly unemployed artists and actors.
Grunge lit (an abbreviation for "grunge literature") is an Australian literary genre usually applied to fictional or semi-autobiographical writing concerned with dissatisfied and disenfranchised[1] young people living in suburban or inner-city surroundings, or in "in-between" spaces that fall into neither category (e.g., living in a mobile home or sleeping on a beach[2]). It was typically written by "new, young authors"[3] who examined "gritty, dirty, real existences",[3] of lower-income young people, whose egocentric or narcissistic lives[4] revolve around a nihilistic or "slacker" pursuit of casual sex, recreational drug use and alcohol, which are used to escape boredom. The marginalized characters are able to stay in these "in-between" settings and deal with their "abject bodies" (health problems, disease, etc.). Grunge lit has been described as both a sub-set of dirty realism and an offshoot of Generation X literature.[5] The term "grunge" is a reference to the US rock music genre of grunge.
The genre was first coined in 1995 following the success of Andrew McGahan's first novel Praise which had been released in 1991 and became popular with sub-30-year-old readers, a previously under-investigated demographic.[3] Other authors considered to be "grunge lit" include Linda Jaivin, Fiona McGregor and Justine Ettler. Since its invention, the term "grunge lit" has been retrospectively applied to novels written as early as 1977, namely Helen Garner's Monkey Grip.[5] Grunge lit is often raw, explicit, and vulgar, even to the point of Ettler's The River Ophelia (1995) being labeled pornographic.
The term "grunge lit" and its use to categorise and market this diverse group of writers and authorial styles has been the subject of debate and criticism. Linda Jaivin who disagreed with putting all of these authors in one category, Christos Tsiolkas called the term a "media creation", and Murray Waldren denied grunge lit even was a new genre; he said the works actually are a type of the pre-existing dirty realism genre.
^Vernay, Jean-François. "Grunge Fiction". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 06 November 2008
accessed 18 December 2017.
^Brooks, Karen (1998). "Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian 'Grunge' Fiction". Australian Literary Studies. 18 (4): 87–99.
^ abcLeishman, Kirsty, 'Australian Grunge Literature and the Conflict between Literary Generations', Journal of Australian Studies, 23.63 (1999), pp. 94–102
^Vernav, Jean-François (2016). A Brief Take on the Australian Novel. Wakefield Press (Adelaide, South Australia). p. 127. ISBN 978-1-74305-404-8.
^ abCite error: The named reference vernay was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
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