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Helen Garner is greedy with biscuits. So she tells me, over coffee and shortbreads in her hotel room in Sydney's Rocks area the week Joe Cinque's Consolation is released. Hard to believe, I think, as I study this trim, energetic sixty-two-year-old whose nationwide publicity schedule would leave most of us grasping for something much stronger than a cookie. As Garner talks generously about her thirty year writing career, it seems to me that her real greed ? if she has one ? is for shaping meaning from the complex, often incomprehensible stories of real life.
It took Garner five years to write Joe Cinque's Consolation, so complex were the events that allowed Joe Cinque, a twenty-six-year old Canberra engineer, to be drugged and then given a lethal injection of heroin by his twenty-five-year-old law student girl friend, Anu Singh, in 1997.
Singh, a manipulative, middle-class woman with a history of drug use, eating disorders and narcissistic delusions, as the story goes coerced her ?mousey friend? and fellow law student, Madhavi Rao, into helping her research suicide methods, and confided in her a plan to kill herself and take Joe with her. After the second of two 'farewell' dinner parties ? where some guests were aware of Singh's apparent suicide plans ? she drugged Joe with Rohypnol and shot him up with heroin, causing his very slow death.
At her trial in 1999 Anu Singh was acquitted of murder but convicted of manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility. Sentenced to ten years jail, she served a little over four. Madhavi Rao, described by Garner as a ?moral wraith?, was acquitted and now lives overseas.
Murders fascinate us, Garner suggests, because they show us ordinary people who 'crack'. But she also had very personal reasons for becoming interested in the Cinque case. At the time of Singh's trial Garner's third marriage (to writer Murray Bail) had just broken up ?in a welter of desolation?. ?I felt sympathetic towards women who kill blokes,? Garner joked at her book launch. But as she sat through the trials of Singh and Rao, Garner's sympathy shifted towards the dead young man:
Whatever the reason, I sided with Joe Cinque. I searched for him in all the documents. But every...