Three of Australia’s most acclaimed writers have teamed up to write The Mushroom Tapes, about the weeks they spent at the triple-murder trial, picking apart lies, media ethics and evil
“None of us wants to write about this. And none of us wants to not write about it.”
The profound inner conflict of the three narrators begins on page two of The Mushroom Tapes and never quite resolves, lingering as an ethical tension that colours almost every page.
Four months on from the guilty verdict, Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, three of Australia’s most acclaimed writers, appear to have made their peace with the queasy ambivalence that plagued them while covering the Erin Patterson case; an ambivalence that was not shared by the global media as it covered the sensational 10-week trial.
Have we all reached saturation point by now? Have we devoured enough of the tale about a dish wonderfully described in The Mushroom Tapes as the “flamboyantly retro” beef wellington? The elusive food dehydrator? The fake cancer? The fake cat? Here we are, still turning the page, still clicking the headlines, still asking: what was she thinking?
