I blame Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and to a lesser degree, Kate Holden’s memoir, In My Skin, for the guff written by many young Australian fiction writers today.

Libby Angel’s novel, Where I Sleep is fair average quality taken from diaries of the narrator’s time in Melbourne in the 1990s.

It’s about a young failed university student, searching for a life of creative gristle and a couch. She flits between share houses, squats and sexual encounters.

It’s got a load of creative types including dancers, photographers and visual artists, all thrown on the page without characterisation.

As The Guardian review says, “each moment rolls into the next, as things do when you are unmoored and young, with a voyeuristic allure … the narrator trying heroin with two junkie housemates, taking acid and playing toy instruments in the street.”

I lived in Melbourne in the late 80s, 90s and early 2000s. I could have introduced Angel to a shitload of self-centred arty-types, predominantly from Adelaide, who came over to spoil good, clean Melbourne fun.

The problem with being self-centred, is that it’s boring and Where I Sleep is no exception.