TRUE CRIME

The Mushroom Tapes: Conversations on a Triple Murder Trial

Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper, Sarah Krasnostein

Text, $36

“None of us wants to write about this. And none of us wants not to write about it.” So it turns out that they – Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein, this true-crime supergroup – both haven’t and have written about the Erin Patterson trial. They started recording their conversations and travelling down to Morwell without a firm idea of the result. A podcast was suggested but that fell over, and the recordings have now been transcribed, with linking narrative, to become this book.

Garner’s journalism, in particular, has always featured a good deal of reflexiveness: the process is included in the product. But here the transcript form really shows th

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