When he asks what kind of work I do, I tell him I am a poet.
‘Poetry will break your heart,’ he says.
‘Or, perhaps it is the only thing that won’t,’ I say.
Where I Slept is the story of a young woman’s devastating and inspirational search for a life of artistic integrity.
Leaving a seedy boarding house in a provincial town in the 1990s, she travels to Melbourne—to all the possibilities of the city. She lives in bohemian share houses with painters, activists, addicts and petty criminals, on the couches of friends and not-so-accommodating acquaintances and, for a time, in the streets, parks and railway stations of a city both richly gratifying and callously indifferent.
Libby Angel’s work of autofiction is an unforgettable portrait of a life on the fringes, peppered with dark humour and moments of elation—a poem of longing and desire.
andWhere I Slept
‘A kicker of a novel, full of beauty and grit.’
‘An unsparing, unflinching and exquisitely precise rendering of 1990s Melbourne counter-culture.’
‘Sharp and sobering…Angel’s work shares the grittiness of Helen Garner’s writing…and the dry, black humour of Meg Mason.’
‘The book, like the art of Warhol and his contemporaries, is presented in jagged, crafted sections…In a sense, Where I Slept is a ‘90s version of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip…But it’s something far stranger and darker…Garner’s narrators are finding a new normal; Angel’s narrator rejects normal altogether.’
‘Angel has created an intense period piece in this book, beautifully written, full of surprisingly funny detail and scenes that live beyond the page, with crisp dialogue that draws the reader (back) into this time now long past. Where I Slept really got to me, and I’m still thinking about it.’
‘Eschewing adornment and cliche, Angel writes with a poet’s precision and she evokes no character as viscerally as they places they rest their heads…Angel’s work is an immersive, elevated chronicle of her own suffering and exhilaration, offering an engaging protagonist through whom unsentimental truths are revealed about a life lived on the margins.’
‘[Libby Angel] does a brilliant job of bringing to life her protagonist’s squalid surrounds…Where I Slept will solidify Angel’s reputation as a literary force to be reckoned with. The book’s gritty urbanity and feminist sensibility make it a Monkey Grip of the Y2K era.’
‘Laced with biting humour and a poetic quality…Angel’s visceral depictions of cramped, unsanitary, unfettered living conditions go to the heart of her intentions to deconstruct the perceived romanticism of the freewheeling, bohemian lifestyle.’
‘Where I Slept paints a rich and immersive picture of the artistic Bohemia of 1990s urban Melbourne…The novel is, in the end, a sort of ode to exploration and personal growth.’
‘This novel is as much a portrait of vanished Melbourne as it is of the narrator’s artistic journey.’
‘Reminiscent of Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, but for the grunge generation.’
