The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial

Clear your diaries, because The Mushroom Tapes is categorically a must-read, diary-clearing kind of book: the hotly anticipated literary engagement with the infamous and internationally compelling Erin Patterson triple murder trial that we’ve all been waiting for, and undoubtedly the nonfiction book of the season. Written by three of the best writers in the business – Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, Sarah Krasnostein – who joined forces and interests to follow the trial together, and create something they could not have done alone, this book is, as we who know these writers’ works individually have hoped, greater than the sum of its parts, their collaboration supercharging their insights, concerns, expertise.

But enough of the hype, and first, a confession: I’m not a true crime kind of gal. I have listened to no podcasts (of any kind), and was only moderately interested in the ‘mushroom trial’ (as it has come to be known), as part of the background news feed that is part of one’s daily life: I was not trawling the internet for clues of my own, hypothesising, or otherwise obsessed with this case, as interesting and unusual as it is. If you are one of these types, you’ll know much of the factual material that the book conveys, but, like the authors, you might not have been quite sure what to do with all the pieces of this very public puzzle, and were looking for a way through the evidence that builds up and leads, inevitably, to Patterson’s guilty verdict, seeking the answer to the pressing question, ‘why?’. Here, Team Mushroom shows you a way. But for those of us without this depth of detail, there is enough here to get us up to speed (and to leave us suitably aghast), and learn about the distinct personalities both inside and outside the courtroom and the terrain of its Gippsland location, but then the focus becomes the words of our guides, each unique, honest, and unmistakable in their personalities. They cover all the questions of ethics and purpose we might all wish were answered about this crime and all true crime writing. There is nothing gawkish or gratuitous about this book (or, as Garner fears at one point, they’re not ‘perving’). Its register is inquisitive, reflexive, curious, cautious, a cultural inquisition with psychological heft, always mindful of the lives affected and lost following the terrible event of that infamous beef wellington lunch, and interrogative of the collective interest in the gloom.

I couldn’t stop reading this book, told as it is in a series of transcripts of two- and three-way conversations, sometimes in the car or over the phone or over lunch during breaks in the court proceedings, which had been destined for a podcast of its own that didn’t eventuate, but instead we – lucky readers, all – can gulp down, right to its final beautiful paragraph, after which I audibly sighed, ‘wow’.