The ordinary moment that changed Jane Caro’s career
It’s a strange idea, safe danger. That contradiction is part of why we’re drawn to crime novels, says Jane Caro, who has just written her second. “On some level, we recognise that danger is the reality of our lives, that we are vulnerable envelopes of flesh, but we have to live in an illusion of safety to function. So we love play danger, safe danger.”
It’s part of why we slow down at car accidents, says the writer, commentator and former advertising executive, quoting a psychologist she heard interviewed about that seemingly ghoulish, universal fascination. “In some ways, you’ve played it out, you’ve rehearsed it. Women, in particular, are attracted to crime because they know that one in three women are raped; the number of women who’ve experienced male violence is very high. As Margaret Atwood said: ‘Men fear women will laugh at them, women fear men will kill them’.”
Jane Caro found that confronting the illusion of safety helped her stop fearing danger.Credit: James Brickwood
Speaking ahead of the release of her latest novel, Lyrebird, Caro says “in life there are no answers until you die”.
Not that she hasn’t faced some of life’s more extreme scenarios. In 1988, her first child was born prematurely and nearly died, spending eight to 10 days in intensive care. Caro says it was a brutal introduction to parenthood. “I’d had an anxiety neurosis for some years, and weirdly, real danger chased out fantasy danger. Not immediately, but that’s when it started to get unpicked.”
One of the people who helped her and her husband through that time was a neonatologist, who had also lost a child and been a grief counsellor. What he said stayed with her: “The first thing I want to say is there’s nothing special about you and there’s nothing special about your daughter. Terrible things can happen, and they can happen to anyone. Safety is an illusion. Danger is the reality.”
All women, she says, live with some degree of fear. “It might be buried deep, you might not think about it a lot,” she says. “Crime fiction, especially when crimes are committed against women by men, is a safe way of rehearsing that scenario in your head. I don’t condemn the attraction, I don’t think it’s ghoulish or bizarre. Women feel more defenceless in the face of male violence and rage and hate. One of the reasons for this upswing in brutal jocularity is to drive home to us how vulnerable we are, it’s an intimidatory tactic. And that has to be resisted.”
Best known for non-fiction and commentary, Caro has written several books, including her first crime novel, The Mother, in 2022, a fictionalised series about Queen Elizabeth I (Just a Girl, Just a Queen and Just Flesh and Blood) and her memoir, Plain-Speaking Jane; non-fiction offerings include one on feminism and another on the need for public education. A regular on ABC TV’s Gruen and a columnist for this masthead, social justice underpins much of her work.
All her writing has a feminist bent, even though it’s not a conscious thing. “It’s so much a part of who I am that it happens automatically.”
Inspiration for Lyrebird came a few years ago, when she was struggling with the idea for another novel. Out for a walk with her husband in the Barrington Tops National Park, they happened upon one of the celebrated birds and followed it for a while. “I suddenly thought, ‘They mimic things! Couldn’t they mimic the sounds of a murder?’ Of course, as soon as I started thinking that, the other novel was dead in the water. I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
The story follows a cold case set in that part of the world, in part inspired by real events including bushfires. Caro says it lands even more powerfully now than when she first had the idea. “We’re now in an even darker time. The treatment of women, particularly vulnerable women, is even more top of mind for me than it was then,” she says.
“Which I think has also revealed that the progress that we thought we’d made – not simply in things like legislation and anti-discrimination, what the Americans call DEI, but also in attitudes towards women and our rights – we haven’t progressed as far as we thought and the attitudes towards women as a kind of commodity are still so powerful and are, in fact, being asserted again with a ruthless and sneering jocularity.”
Everything from changes to protections afforded by the courts, such as the abortion case, Roe v Wade, to behaviour normalised by US President Donald Trump has undermined women’s rights.
“It gives permission to a whole lot of people who thought they had to keep their opinions to themselves and who think women exist purely for the pleasure of men and that we have no other role. To be used at will, particularly these vulnerable women. It’s become an almost mainstream attitude.”
Caro hopes people understand what she is trying to say in Lyrebird. Sometimes, it’s illuminating what readers take from your books, she says, recalling a question after a session at the Melbourne Writers Festival when her first novel was published.
“A little slip of a girl asked me a fantastic question: When you wrote Just a Girl, did you realise you were rewriting the Cinderella story?”
It was not an idea she had considered, but it resonated: Queen Elizabeth had been a hero since her childhood. “All of the women in books I read as a young girl were rescued by a prince, but Queen Elizabeth I refused to marry ... She grew up, became her own prince and rescued herself! I realised then that readers see things and understand things that writers don’t.
“Another thing I’ve realised about my writing – it doesn’t matter if it’s fiction nor non-fiction. It’s about women holding onto their power, or taking the power back, or wielding the power. In Lyrebird, it’s women who find out who did it.”
Research is essential for her work, and she credits her friend, Kate McClymont – investigative reporter for this masthead – with putting her in touch with police and crime specialists.
Caro is one of those fortunate writers whose “characters arrive pretty much fully formed – and with their names”. “They do have a life of their own. I know I am making them up, and I know I’m inventing them, but they do feel like they have their own ideas.”
She loves writing crime, even though it is “in the dark”, as she describes it. “You have to keep a membrane between you and the horror. Then you can be of use ... maybe like a nurse or a doctor dealing with the aftermath of these horrible experiences. You have to keep a distance between what’s happening and your own emotional responses.
“There’s also a sense of I’m doing something about this, exposing it or trying to understand it in a way that just a headline can’t. So, you do get into the dark, you do get involved but I have to acknowledge, there’s always the author at the back of your head.”
Lyrebird (Allen & Unwin) is out April 1.
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