‘The wildness that one keeps in its cage’: Helen Garner and the rise of auto-true crime

Abstract

This article proposes auto-true crime as a distinct hybrid mode of first-person true crime writing, one in which ethical meaning is negotiated through the narrating subject’s position as an affectively implicated witness. I formulate this mode through close readings of Helen Garner’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) and This House of Grief (2014), which are regarded as important and contested works of true crime literature. I argue that Garner’s trial narratives depart from the genre’s conventional claims to objectivity by placing the writer’s own perceptions and judgements at the heart of their account. Her narratives move between two modes of ethical witnessing: acts of consolation grounded in proximity and consent, and a practice of accountability grounded in restraint.