Family matters

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 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.

Maybe the first book in terms of influence that springs to mind is Gillian Rose’s Love Work, because that’s a very personal and painful journey that’s also a work of philosophy, of thinking through. I think that was fairly formative in showing me what was possible. But there are so many others: Helen Macdonald’s H is for Hawke; Maggie Nelson’s books; Viv Albertine’s To Throw Away Unopened, another story about sisterhood; Jessica Friedmann’s Things That Helped; Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life; Maria Tumarkin’s Axiomatic. And many more. It’s a very rich time for this kind of writing.

What was your relationship with editors at Scribe throughout the journey to publication? Usually I write a book to first draft before offering it to publishers, but with this one I approached Scribe with the proposal. I felt I needed an editor, because it was very hard to see outside the work. I think I am only now beginning to be able to talk about it in any rational way. I was very grateful to have David Golding’s expert eye and mind as a sounding board. Basically, I drafted it and sent it to David and he suggested some structural things and cut out all the things that I repeated and repeated, because I was worried I hadn’t already said them.

How have you responded to the immensely positive critical reaction to the book? The nice reviews have of course been gratifying and, to be honest, a little unexpected. I think I was braced for rougher treatment. Which isn’t to say that won’t happen! It’s always fascinating to hear what people make of a book like this. It’s about a lot of things. At its heart, it’s an exploration of what it means to be white, in a culture and history that is shaped by imperialism and colonialism, and how the delusions of empire affect and distort our psyches and the most intimate aspects of our lives and relationships as white people.

Since becoming arts editor of The Saturday Paper, what has struck you the most about the state of arts criticism in Australia? The main problem with Australian arts criticism – and here I’m talking about criticism in mass media – is that there isn’t enough of it: not enough space, not enough voices. We have good critics here, but we don’t have a strong sense of conversation or exchange. A healthy public critical culture embraces a wide range of thinking and is easily accessible; it’s not defensive, it looks outward, and it’s curious and dynamic. I do think art is for everyone, and that it’s not perceived to be the case here for many people has a great deal to do with how newspapers have traditionally valued the arts – it was regarded as a ‘soft’ option, unimportant, a bit of a wank. There wasn’t even a separate arts category in the Walkley Awards for arts criticism and journalism until the past few years.

Can you also identify the key ways the tone and values of arts criticism in Australia have changed since you began your career? For most of its history, Australian arts criticism has been overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly cis male and overwhelmingly middle-class. I’ve mostly worked as a theatre critic, where the critique has often been overwhelmingly anti-intellectual as well – this is less of a problem in literature or visual arts. The advent of the internet and the emergence of arts blogs in the early 2000s challenged that in very lively ways – a lot of young, smart and argumentative intellects entered the fray, and nobody could stop them. For a while it was enormous fun, creating an amazing conversation between artists, audience members and critics, and we had a glimpse of what a good critical culture might be like. That culture has mostly died since the internet was corporatised in the 2010s – back in the day you could start a blog and get a high international readership just by publishing interesting work. You can’t do that anymore. And also, although people say they want a critical culture, for all the good reasons we actually need one, it’s very hard to sustain, especially in a time when the arts themselves are struggling. The other reason blogs died was that people just can’t keep working that hard for no money. I guess this was brought home for me last month, when I had to close a performance criticism website called Witness I co-founded with Robert Reid four years ago because it was just too hard. We did almost everything we hoped to do except find a way to make a living from it. I really enjoy working for The Saturday Paper, it’s kind of a dream job. Perhaps that aspect of mentorship is the most important part of my job. If we don’t have new voices entering the conversation, everything stagnates. Within the limitations of a national weekly print paper with its necessarily limited space, I am trying to broaden the critical palette, to bring in different kinds of cultural expertise that reflect the manifold ways art is being made in the 2020s and the myriad urgent questions it addresses. I want criticism to open doors, not to close them.