INTERVIEW
Confronting monsters: Alison Croggon interviewed Alison Croggon’s acclaimed memoir, Monsters, is a true exercise in literary innovation in its melding of memoir and essay, addressing the painful breakdown of a family relationship as well as questions of colonialism, culture and history. Croggon, who was due to appear at Byron Writers Festival 2021, is also the arts editor of The Saturday Paper and an award-winning critic, poet and novelist. What was the initial motivation for writing Monsters? It’s one of those books that has been years in the making, in that the questions that impelled it have been bothering me for decades, and I’ve had several attempts, in both prose and poetry, to address them. What specifically prompted it was the painful breach with one of my sisters around five years ago, which 10 | SPRING 2021 northerly
threw all those old questions into sharp and painful relief. Were there any other memoirs that particularly influenced the style and structure of the book? Quite a few. I’ve always been attracted to hybrid works that resist easy classification, a reflection maybe of my own working across and between genres – I started off as a poet, and have worked as a
critic, a theatre writer and as a genre novelist, among other things. Form is a crucial part of expression, and I have always been interested in bending or breaking it: my first ever prose work, Navigatio, was actually a blend of memoir/essay and fiction, in alternating chapters, and was an early attempt at Monsters. I didn’t get it right, so this is my latest attempt. And I sincerely hope I never have to do it again.
