Alice Garner's childhood and adolescence had been anything but conventional. She moved into new communal households every few years, lived with her mother in Paris aged eight and was set on an early acting career after starring in the film Monkey Grip. By the time Alice was in her twenties she hoped university would bring order to her slightly chaotic life.
The Student Chronicles is a lively account of Alice's years at university in the 1990s which, she discovers, differed radically from the experience of her parent's generation. Free tertiary education had come to an end and a new managerialism had infiltrated the academy. Student households were, however, as shambolic as they always had been. In her student memoir, Alice reflects on the pleasures (and pain) of learning. Her love of delving into the archives coincides with the making of the campus hit comedy Love and Other Catastrophes, which eventually takes this student to Cannes.
