The Mushroom Tapes opens with a blunt refusal to accept a murder trial as spectator sport:

It starts and we are not even there. Everyone in the world is talking about it. People say to us, you must be going. No, we answer. No. No. No. A woman is being tried for triple murder.“

I doubt there is an Australian who has not at least heard of the “mushroom murders” case – Erin Patterson’s trial and conviction for the triple murder of her estranged husband’s parents and aunt (and attempted murder of his uncle), via a beef Wellington containing death cap mushrooms.

Last week, it was reported that she is appealing her triple murder conviction on seven grounds.

There has been a continuing flood of articles, podcasts, TV documentaries, and armchair detectives posting on social media.

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Review: The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial – Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein (Text Publishing)

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Just weeks after the end of the trial, Australian crime writers Greg Haddrick and Duncan McNab have each already completed a book on it, as has the UK’s Ella Elizabeth Smith.

Personally, I found the public frenzy unappetising. Yet I was utterly captivated by this new volume by literary journalists Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, who sporadically attended the trial (together when they could) and recorded their reflections on it.

All three have successfully published books on crime and social problems, and present the cases they cover from a clear ethical standpoint. If I were asked to pick three people to write about this dramatic, yet banal, crime story, I’d choose them.

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein sporadically attended the trial of Erin Patterson together. Darren James/Text

Public ‘entertainment’, private interrogation

“This trial is being used for public entertainment,” Chloe says, during a discussion between the three about their own approach, and continues: “I feel squeamish about joining the pile-on.”

But they don’t join it. Nor would I have expected them to. The book – which began as a podcast that “fell over” – is a dense, thoughtful, compassionate account of the weeks of the trial. It’s told partly as straightforward narrative, partly in the form of a conversation recorded and transcribed.

The narrative unscrolls across the six sections of the book, flowing effortlessly between observation, information and conversation. Often, the writers think out loud about the issues.

After a day in court, as they are driving away from Morwell, the Victorian country town that hosted the trial, Sarah asks, “Should we talk about the evidence from today? Erin and [her ex-husband] Simon’s kids?” – which they proceed to do.

For Sarah, it is “unbearably sad”. What hits Chloe is “when you hear the children speak, you want it to be true that their mother could be innocent”. Helen focuses on that mother, the changes prison has wrought on her, and the fact there are still flashes of “person”; she’s not simply “the accused”.

Throughout, they riff off each other, and pick up and run with comments, asides and quotations. They talk about the case, and draw analogies between it and their personal experiences:

Sarah: The way he tells it, she’s the one in control, always leaving him, and in her story he is the one trying to control her.

Chloe: This is why people have attached so strongly to this case. Everyone knows how acrimonious things can get between ex-partners.

Helen: […] You can’t just walk out of a marriage. You have to blast your way out, or burrow your way out, or dig your way out.

Paying close attention

They link descriptions of courtroom scenes with dissection of those scenes and observations of their surroundings. For example, on May 19, Helen and Chloe call Sarah — who is not with them that day — to discuss the day’s observations:

Chloe: We’re on a bench outside the bakery, Out of Dough. Helen’s having a plain meat pie.

Sarah: When in Rome.

Chloe: In court, Erin has her glasses on and she’s playing close attention to evidence, which other people find very dry. …

Helen: Well, you could say Dr May [expert witness] was pedantic.

And their conversation continues, elaborating on the courtroom activities, wondering at the omnipresence of fungi in the environment, surprised by the determination of people pressing into the court.

Chloe sums it up: “The public gallery wants a plot twist.”

Threaded with deep reflection on their own ideas, roles, limitations, this produces a dense and deeply engaging weaving of voices, narratives and ideas.

The book is specifically about the murders and the trial. But here and there, these celebrated Australian writers also discuss writing itself: the principles and logic of story, the techniques of producing prose. They also quote works that in some way resonate.

As they wonder how best to open the book, Garner suggests they rework a line from a Walter Scott poem:

Breathes there a wife with soul so dead, who never to herself hath said, I’ll kill them all and run away.

“For some reason, it just shot into my head,” Garner adds. “I am shocked.”

Krasnostein and Hooper respond with suggestions of perhaps more acceptable ways to start, though the eventual opening has nothing in common with these early suggestions … and the conversation (and their drive to the courthouse) rolls on.

Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner and Sarah Krasnostein incorporate conversations about writing their book into the book itself. Monty Coles/Text Publishing

On true crime and real life

This conversation functions as an analogy of the work of writing. We see the energy of inspiration and ideas, the sometimes heavy slog of early drafts, and where they move on to revisions and rewriting.

Garner, Krasnostein and Hooper toss ideas to and fro, and talk about the practicalities and ethics of writing – especially of true crime writing.

Sarah raises this very directly:

Okay, let’s take the kids. How would we write about the evidence we heard today and yesterday? Obviously there are suppression orders that prevent them being identified or described in ways that identify them. But the ethical issues don’t even begin to be touched by that.

There is no easy solution to that conundrum. But perhaps writing can usefully illuminate the “what is” of true crime. Chloe suggests:

Sometimes, as a writer, there’s a detail that you don’t know how to deal with … But if you can look at it the right way, it’s a portal into something deeper and bigger.

Sarah: It’s signalling to you, “Look again! I’m weird for a reason.”

The result is a dense, deeply engaging weaving of voices, narratives and ideas. A most enticing aspect of reading this book is the opportunity to eavesdrop on three highly intelligent and capable writers – and to watch them determine how best to sort and structure the narratives of identity we need to live in our communities, through writing a true crime book together:

Chloe: It’s interesting though, isn’t it, the idea that the rent in the social fabric gets healed when she’s driven off in the van.

Sarah: Yeah, what has been hidden is now manifest. … And now everyone can feel purged.

‘It’s interesting … the idea that the rent in the social fabric gets healed when she’s driven off in the van’ reflects Chloe Hooper. Joel Carrett/AAP

Not that this is something that actually can happen; not that writing can sort and structure society in any enduring way. Sarah mentions the sociological concept of “‘communitas’: how strangers who go through a big experience together form an intense bond.” But that bond is not enduring. Rather, as the others observe about the whole experience:

Chloe: Like a fever dream, everybody’s sort of …

Helen: … bouncing it off each other.

The writers themselves are sometimes befuddled by what they see and hear. They may have come to the case with expectations and pre-judgements, but they do not take their own early opinions for granted. Instead, they reflect on those positions.

They reflect, too, on why there is such public fascination with this – to be frank – pretty banal murder scenario. Family violence is not, tragically, a rare event: in 2024, 39% of all homicide cases in Australia were the product of family or domestic violence. Yet people are so fascinated by this murder.

Perhaps because women – in particular mothers – are not supposed to commit murder. If they do, they become the property of media outlets, the site for public projections. “Lindy Chamberlain was once the most known woman in Australia,” notes Garner, “what was projected onto her was outrageous.”

Indeed, gender is at the heart of this event – and this book. On the company of other women at the trial, Garner reflects:

I felt great companionship there. Do you think it’s because it’s a woman’s trial? That’s why we’re all here, isn’t it?

This book is also, necessarily, the story of the law itself. Krasnostein, a lawyer, explains law as a situation where “we’re trying to repair a rift in shared ethics”. This attempt manifests in court cases as “two partial narratives fighting it out”.

They are inevitably “partial narratives” because we can never get the whole story of any history. Nor can we reliably determine what is and isn’t true – or even what is and isn’t real.

Sarah Krasnostein, a lawyer, explains law as a situation where ‘we’re trying to repair a rift in shared ethics’. Text Publishing

Fairytales and archetypes

Perhaps this uncertainty is what so absorbed viewers and observers. Krasnostein describes the trial, and specifically the poisoning at its centre, as an archetypal story: “Adam and Eve and the apple. It’s throughout myths and fairytales.”

Hooper extends this idea:

Indulge me on this, but mushrooms often appear in children’s literature … They are used as little houses. They’re characters in certain books. They’re also used on potions. Food in these stories has a transformative effect; people cook or are fed magical or poisonous things that make them become other things.

The fairytale has the capacity to draw us in; it blurs the distinction between the unfamiliar and the familiar – and it fits random and confounding elements into a narrative we understand. The Patterson story is a narrative that is otherwise difficult to understand. The authors tease out its complexity, and the struggle to find meaning in it all.

What they don’t do is offer a comfortable conclusion.

Instead they stick with observation and commentary. Importantly, they keep returning to and reflecting on the real-life human beings who populate this story. Helen, for example, says of Erin Patterson that “She sighed a lot. She sighed the sort of sighs that you give when someone asks you a question you’ve already answered”.

The Pattersons and their families and neighbours, the legal staff and the journalists, the townsfolk, and above all the children. All are recognised as themselves. These are people who had lives they cared about, children and friends and gardens and pantries that matter or mattered to them.

Helen says: “Oh, the fog lying like a blanket over this sad town.” Surely all those caught up in this case deserve our respect and our empathy: even Erin Patterson, to whom her surviving victim, Ian Wilkinson, made “an offer of forgiveness”. This, for the authors, allows the whole event to end with “an enlargement of the field”.

This sort of writing is both a record of and a witness to the confusing, tangled, unhappy, unnecessary crime and tragedy. It presents an alternative perspective on this story, and on how we observers might perceive and reflect on the horrific things humans can do.

In this, it allows readers to see – and to feel – the human element in what seems a most inhuman place.