Darkness All Too Visible
The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial, by Chloe Hooper, Helen Garner, and Sarah Krasnostein
[note: what follows assumes familiarity with a case which obsessed the Australian and some other media, becoming known as the Mushroom Case, so if you have no idea what that means, have a look here for an excellent summary, and note that now Erin Patterson, accused of three counts of murder by death cap mushroom-layered beef Wellington in 2023, was found guilty, and as of now is appealing a life sentence with a thirty-three year non-parole period]
As reporting fades into podcasts deleted the questions keep coming up, because there will be more books and TV and feeds (probably poetry and paintings) to come.
What more can be said of this, most famous, criminal case? (Anyway, most famous in our area.) (Gippsland, southeastern Victoria.)
Who has the gall outside the jury to judge the accused in this crime so far out toward our own extremes?
What business is it of mine?
Poignantly human responses to these questions curl through The Mushroom Tapes.
Also, to the big question, which we know judge instructed jury to disregard:
What could make anybody do such a thing?
The judge proved a hero of combining institutional process with a human court. The authors interrogate so much in this with open hearts, eyes, and wit. Dig into each question well beyond the court’s purview in a measured fashion that will, I think, last well.
Of course, in a book contending with what’s titillating, done-to-death, distasteful, your reviewer will want compensatory levels of insight, apt expression, human wisdom, basic information on our institutions.
Which here comprises a social and professional interaction between three minds for which Australians (and increasingly others) would give more than this book’s cover price to interact with on a car journey or in a Morwell cafe.
Sarah: […] Erin was estranged from her parents, so Don and Gail became even more important for the practical and emotional support they gave. Love betrayed is often the motive for extreme rage. I allmost find it more incriminating the more she talks about this well of deep feeling she had for them, because this rage about rejection hovers at the edges.
Helen: I felt awful when it was over today. I was sad. I thought it was an archetypal modern story of marriage not being something that people are up to anymore. I thought, she’s sat down with her counsel and shaped this story. But then I felt that familiar sadness of when you’re fucking something up in a really big way.
Sarah: […] It made me think of how she had described her childhood so darkly and what it might have meant to her to step into that little church and find herself welcomed. That in itself could’ve felt like a spiritual experience.
Chloe: It must have been heightened: love and at the same time God. Those two feelings of heat commingling. Although, interestingly, Sarah and I noted that Erin didn’t take an oath on the Bible.
Hearing her story about being in the church, I thought, she is a Krasnosteain character, like someone in Sara’s book The Believer.
Sarah: […]I was really interested in the too-perfect stories people tell themselves when they can’t face the gap between the world as it is and the world as they desperately wish it could be. There’s a chance that her spiritual experience was just another easy lie. But maybe it wasn’t: she sounds like she was ravenous. Family-hungry. Accceptance-hungry.
But it’s not hanging together. […]
Helen: I know people who, while they’re talking, make me think, I don’t believe a word of this. Not factually—something deeper is off. Everybody’s got to create a persona, of course. No one can walk around in the world with their soul bared. It’s got to be shielded and veiled in some way, just so you can stand the stress of being alive. But the false self is something more impermeable. A false self is like a glass that’s pretending to be crystal. […] It doesn’t make a proper ring.
Garner, Krasnostein, and Hooper, individually celebrated and sharply perceptive, brutally honest biographers, aspartate essayists, and gut-wrenching novelists, in The Mushroom Tapes have not muddied individual waters with a six-legged (four?) spoon race, they marry, rather, into something more and other, though for time and age and never having expected to write such a thing, necessarily slender.
It manages to reach sensitiviely into what destroyed and battered so many. To illuminate, not neatly answer.
For myself, more Australian for having crashed repeatedly into what it means to be an “ethnic,” have a gender, straight job, live under this legal mobius fly strip of sovereignty, effect social and technological changes in a complicated and conservative and sceptical and self-interested country—I was inspired by this “trialogue” to see something more clearly, about limits, the jails of everyday life, confines with which we struggle, and sometimes fail. Genuine transgression broached with a retrospective straight face. Because, fuck it, the more extreme and defiant, the less tempted you’ll be to retreat into guilt, shame, a lower humanity even than before.
Where you alone dwelled.
Crashing through, into what puts one so extremely beyond the pale, releases one into another space altogether. Major Tom space. Why on earth? The answer to Patterson’s motivation is not to be found on solid earth. It is the deadly fascination of standing on the edge of a cliff, by the airlock, but also that of knowing from a thousand books and films—and an inheritance via osmosis of one’s parent’s business, so much more important than you. That sometimes when an exceptional individual jumps, they can fly. And I am that exception. I could be. I’m not (but I am).
Where unbothered by kryptonite or mosquito intelligences, true believers who are not true to you, the intellect may derive further capability because untethered by decency or history or custom. Or religion. A power of psychopathy, but also of “eccentric genius.”
It’s pathology, entertainment category, and a source of genuine invention. The problem with all of this balderdash is that it contains a grain, sometimes several. For the few.
The authors, tense ramblers, eaters of country foods, bring their sui generis perspectives and also some connections they discover in the hours driving between Morwell and Melbourne. In the long draw of the trial. For example, they clarified Patterson’s upbringing for me and placed it in the contexts of humanist feminism of my generation and modern career choices. Patterson’s mother was an academic specialising in children’s literature, and other Melbourne writers they knew had connections.
Patterson is an educated—I keep hearing “bright”—middle class, probably atheist, woman, and the very notion of death by beef Wellington is an early cosmopolitan one made literal, food from her previous, psychedelic generation.
I recall too many fancy 1970s restaurants (with matching plates). The whole having-the-runs-in-white-pants thing (sorry) is just one 21st Century image here rendering the 70s picture odd.
In ways merely sketched by younger, less heavyweight investigators, The Mushroom Tapes recognises Patterson’s version of her upbringing as unknowable, and yet comes down on the side that it’s more likely mythical, given that the jury’s point at the climax of all the evidence was to effectively declare her an elaborate and skilful liar.
Children internalise their parents’ professions in ways unexpectedly heritable, as it were, sometimes inspired—also insanely wrong-headed. I know I’ve done all of the above.
Patterson’s is ultimately a literary fabrication, almost paraliterary considering her true crime community, where she gives the single explanation for the state of an adult, growing from the proverbial poisonous spore of childhood trauma or neglect, fruiting in the mulch of betrayal, akin to how 1950s autism was thought to derive from non-hugging mothers. It was this kind of just-so story the second half of the century reacted against. And the generation after that reacted again. Into what?
The perfect pastoral home1; the arms of Christian belief. And when that fell apart, true crime.
Who better to take on tragic flaw and flaw of tragedy in the stories we tell ourselves and others than three of the finest Australian practitioners? Ones who have slipped back and forth between fiction and non-fiction, biography and diary, immersed in the small details of life as well as their complications. The small details that personify the complications.
Patterson’s underlying message in the trial where she was pleading not guilty was that she should be found not guilty even if she was guilty because, anyway, it was not her fault. People were mean to her. She gave love and money and was spurned as one not of this community, even if she had in the first place arrived here in only in reaction, reaction to what she felt she had been forced to be by her upbringing, and she was still what she had been and proud of it. Her motivation was supposed to be unknowable except where—without copping to it explicitly—she held it up as a good reason for killing.
It is this kind of double thinking that fills the airwaves right now. Probably did the paper waves as well, back in the day. It is so attractive played out in a forum where its personification must sit in the box for cross examination, and meet judgement, unlike so many cases elsewhere that make us tear our hair out in hunks.
We have in a US President the prime manifestation of those who make believe—even do believe, if in anything—they’re living a self-produced movie; we have overflowing fascination for a criminal who insists on, but is ultimately rejected in, a defence of life imitating art.
I didn’t do it but it would have been only fair (but I didn’t).
Let that be a lesson to us. (It will not.)
It really is gorgeous in Gippsland. Don’t come here.