Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock knew the power of a meal gone fatally wrong. From poisoned tarts to deadly dinner parties, their murder mysteries had the knack of transforming the domestic into the diabolical.

Now, real life has delivered its own gothic culinary thriller – and the literary and entertainment worlds are eating it up.

The conviction of Erin Patterson, the Victorian woman found guilty of murdering three members of her estranged husband’s family – and attempting to murder a fourth – with a homemade beef wellington laced with death cap mushrooms, has created an international media maelstrom. Publishing houses, streaming platforms, film studios and podcast producers are circling the story like salivating wolves closing in to make a killing.

Even before the jury delivered its guilty verdict on Monday, Australia’s national public broadcaster, the ABC, confirmed it was turning the Patterson poisoning into a TV drama. Its co-creator Tony Ayres (The Survivors, Clickbait) told Deadline that Toxic would “go beyond the surface – to reveal, not just sensationalise”, and he was working closely with the ABC journalist Rachael Brown, co-podcaster of Mushroom Case Daily, the ABC’s most successful podcast in a decade.

It is one of some half a dozen podcasts that covered the murder trial daily, with reporters from around the world flocking to the Latrobe Valley law courts.

These podcast series are now expected to delve deeper into the forensic science behind mushroom toxicity, the ethics of food preparation, and the cultural fascination with domestic crime.

This Sunday, Seven is promising a Spotlight Special, with a criminal barrister, a forensic psychologist, a former detective, and journalists dissecting the trial and the convicted poisoner’s motives.

And Nine has confirmed a deal with its streaming platform Stan for Death Cap, a documentary that Screen Australia promises will showcase “exclusive access into the investigation and trial” and examine “how one lethal lunch can shatter the myth of small-town security in Australia”.

Comparisons to the 2004 Netflix hit The Staircase, based on the true case of Michael Peterson, an American novelist accused of murdering his wife who was found dead at the bottom of the stairs in their North Carolina home in 2001, abound.

Toni Collette who played the victim in The Staircase, is being touted on social media as an ideal actor to play Patterson.

New Idea threw local names Magda Szubanski, Mandy McElhinney and Jacki Weaver into the mix, along with Hollywood heavyweights Melissa McCarthy and Kathy Bates, and Baby Reindeer’s Jessica Gunning.

With one of Australia’s most lauded novelists Helen Garner spotted in the Morwell court public gallery, there has been speculation that another gripping work of nonfiction, along the lines of This House of Grief, her 2014 work about the trial of Robert Farquharson, convicted of crashing his car into a dam and killing his three sons, is in the works.

And Allen & Unwin has already announced it will publish The Mushroom Murders, a nonfiction work by the Underbelly creator Greg Haddrick – “with details not previously published” – in November. On Wednesday, Hachette Australia announced it had acquired world rights for Recipe for Murder, authored by Duncan McNab.

With global media outlets including CNN, the BBC and Al Jazeera covering the verdict, the story’s reach has been unprecedented for an Australian criminal case.

“It resonated with an audience all over the world,” the UK Daily Mail journalist Caroline Cheetham, who gained a cult following with her The Trial Of Erin Patterson podcast, told the ABC.

“It just feels so totally off the wall, bizarre, crazy, bonkers.”

With so many spin-off projects already confirmed, the Erin Patterson saga may now become one of the most dramatised true crime stories in recent memory.

Whether ethical questions, about how the tragic deaths of Gail and Don Patterson and Heather Wilkinson have become entertainment fodder, will be examined remains to be seen.

In the nineteenth century, when a character had premarital sex, you held your breath not for an abortion but for a wedding. Think of “Pride and Prejudice,” where Lydia’s child marriage comes as a great relief. The marriage plot relegates the actual having of children to the last page, just after the rice is thrown and the reader assured that our heroine will be happy and rich. If great Western literature of the time does allude to abortion, it does so subtly or with plausible deniability. The first time I read “War and Peace,” I managed to miss the suggestion that Hélène died of an overdose of abortifacient drugs. In “Middlemarch,” when Rosamond goes horseback riding against the explicit wishes of her doctor husband and subsequently miscarries, Eliot hastens to explain that this was a “misfortune” and that “there were plenty of reasons why she should be tempted to resume her riding.”

Of course, plenty of nonfictional women in the nineteenth century were having abortions. In the U.S., at least, contraception was crude, childbirth was dangerous, food was expensive, and abortion before quickening—the moment when the fetus is first felt to move—was less legally controversial than it is now, though also apparently less likely to be named outright. (Euphemisms included “taking the trade” and “restoring the menses.”) American literature took a while to say the unsayable. Writing students today still learn about understatement from Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” a brief conversation between two lovers who refer only to “an awfully simple operation” that will “let the air in.” In 1917, Edith Wharton dipped a toe in the abortion plot with “Summer,” a novel about a young woman named Charity who visits a money-hungry doctor for an abortion—the actual word is never said—before quickly deciding that “it was impossible to tear asunder strands of life so interwoven.” Keeping the fetus would typically doom Charity to a life of poverty and prostitution, but, at the last minute, Wharton saves the day by marrying her off to her foster father.

By the nineteen-fifties, abortion was not only named in literature, but debated at philosophical length. In Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March” (1953), the question is whether or not life in general is worth living. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” Augie’s pregnant roommate imagines saying to her aborted fetus. “What makes you think you would have liked it?” In Richard Yates’s “Revolutionary Road” (1961), Frank Wheeler describes the moment that he persuades his wife, April, not to abort her first pregnancy as his life’s greatest “proof of manhood.” But he is unable to convince her that she shouldn’t abort her third. “Don’t ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ really mean the same thing?” April asks, a few weeks before she dies of an at-home abortion. Yates gives us April’s calm preparations: her boiling of the syringe, her writing down of the hospital’s phone number. But we are not privy to the ins and outs of the abortion itself: Yates draws a decorous curtain around the rest of the scene.

In the following years, the literary taboo on putting a desexualized vagina on the page would weaken, notably with the portrayal of a diaphragm fitting in Mary McCarthy’s “The Group” (1963) and a tampon insertion in Doris Lessing’s “The Golden Notebook” (1962). McCarthy’s scene, first published as the short story “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself,” is famous not only as literature but as sex education: in “Goodbye, Columbus,” Philip Roth’s young protagonist explains that, though he’s never before procured birth control, he has “read Mary McCarthy.”

“Cleaned Out,” Annie Ernaux’s 1974 fictionalization of her own illegal abortion, points to the lack of an equivalent literary handbook for abortion, even as it is one. Denise, the well-read protagonist, has her feet against the wall with a tube deep inside her; every hour she does scissor movements to bring on the abortion. Nothing she’s read up to now seems to offer any guidance. “There is supposed to be a prayer to suit every occasion,” she laments. “There should be one for a girl of twenty who’s just had a backstreet abortion, what she thinks as she comes out, walks home, and throws herself onto her bed. That one I’d need over and over again.”

“January,” by the Argentinean author Sara Gallardo, is just what Denise wanted to read, though the novel—which was originally published in 1958, never translated into French and appears only now in English, is unlikely to have reached Ernaux. It was, however, influential in Latin America: Gallardo went on a book tour to Chile, Peru, Mexico, and Cuba. Argentinean feminists, who in 2020 won the right to legal abortion nationwide during the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy (a slightly more restrictive line than the one at issue in Dobbs) still reference “January” as a turning point in the nation’s consciousness. Gallardo, a writer of terrifying intelligence, wrote the book when she was in her early twenties.

Our unlikely hero, Nefer, is a sixteen-year-old living under feudal conditions in rural Argentina. Dimly, she recalls being raped at her sister’s wedding: having dolled herself up to impress Negro, a milk-monger who takes no notice of her, she was instead taken, crying, into the woods by a drunken older man. (In Argentina, “el negro,” pronounced with a short “E,” can be a friendly way to refer to a man with darker hair or skin.) Now Nefer is stuck between the childish delusion that the pregnancy will somehow make Negro love and marry her and the desire to get rid of the thing “growing inside her like a dark mushroom.”

The abortion plot frequently uses months or seasons to locate a pregnancy along a symbolic time line of unwanted ripening. (Consider Wharton’s “Summer,” or Yates’s April, or the protagonist of the movie “Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” who is eighteen weeks along and named Autumn.) Here, January—summer in the Southern Hemisphere—represents Nefer’s last chance to interrupt the seed’s growth. Soon it will be harvest time, and “there’ll be no turning back.” Nefer, who for most of the book is unable to remember the word “abortion,” nevertheless attempts to induce one several times. In the horse-centric culture of the Pampas, her first idea is to gallop hard. This failing, she sneaks out during the siesta to visit the local witch doctor but, once there, finds herself unable to ask for what she wants. “People have told me that my characters don’t fight for anything, that they are defined by inertia,” Gallardo said in a 1977 interview with the Argentinean novelist Reina Roffé. “They just know that one can’t fight against adversity or a broken heart.”

Gallardo herself was not so powerless. Born in 1931 in Buenos Aires into a storied lineage of intellectuals—her great-great-grandfather, Bartolomé Mitre, was a President of Argentina—she spent much of her childhood surrounded by books. At twenty-one, against the wishes of her father, she declared her intention to write for La Nación, one of the country’s leading newspapers. She married twice and had four children, including one who died very young. “Motherhood was so important,” she later said, “that it made the arrival of the book seem like a plain fact.” She died at fifty-six, of an asthma attack, leaving behind a body of work that has recently enjoyed a revival in the Spanish-speaking world. Her fiction includes “Los galgos, los galgos,” a novel of decadent love that has not yet been translated into English, and “Land of Smoke,” a collection of dystopian stories, whose blasé violence and clipped lyricism are a clear influence on the contemporary Argentinean writer Samanta Schweblin. Among American writers, Gallardo has been compared to Lucia Berlin or Shirley Jackson, two writers whose work is also undergoing a posthumous reëvaluation.

“It is now urgent to dare to know oneself, to confess to oneself what one is, to ask oneself what one wants to be.”

—Suzanne Césaire, Tropiques

When I was a child, I never had much to say about a Sunday church service, except that I didn’t want to be there. Enduring the dragging hours and unadorned Southern heat, I tried to avoid the redolent church ladies with satyr faces who scowled at anyone who didn’t praise their Lord as they deemed fit. On and off for 12 years, like many other children in our congregation, I read the Bible in French, sang the hymns in Creole, and spoke rebelliously in English.

Luckily, by my own will, this all came to an end, mostly because I was too precocious for my good, constantly questioning the world around me and shedding any belief that there was a God to begin with. So, I stopped going to church at 13 and with that, lost access to a weekly gathering of Black people who were committed to singing, dancing, and dressing their best.

My rejection of Christianity as a spiritual practice is something my mother—though not my agnostic father—continues to criticize me for today. This is mainly because I tipped the spiritual divide in our home toward the heathens; on one side stood the pious, my mother and sister, and on the other stood the unbelievers, my father, my brother, and me.

The things that I missed, which I was too proud to admit to my mother, were the fashion shows and sitting in a large room with Black folk, among the gratuitous display of wheezy-haired dames and the improvisational musicians who could make everybody’s grandma stir. Songs shielded the roar of unadulterated gossiping from echoing through the room. On the whole, the church was where we poured our heart into showing up for the holy: with a complete aesthetic engagement.

I attended Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat in October. An extension of Simone Leigh’s US Pavilion exhibit at the Venice Biennale, the retreat gathered artists, activists, and scholars from all over the world. Curator Rashida Bumbray, along with Professors Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, probed attendees to focus on Black women’s creative and intellectual labor. The event evoked something I had not felt since I was 13: the feelings of the African diaspora being conjured in a place that was not intended for them. I witnessed that art is more than the individual act of seeing; it is a collective act of doing, a tradition that newly emancipated enslaved African Americans carried out.

In 1861, Harriet Jacobs was the first known African woman to publish her narrative about her enslavement. That year, at the outset of the US Civil War, nearly 4 million people were enslaved. Rhetorical abolitionist efforts by people such as Harriet Jacobs show that her biography alone could not set those people free. Rather, it revealed—through text—precisely why they needed to be free.

Then and now, art and scholarship, on their own, cannot and will not solve the problems we have inherited. But we don’t have much at all if we deny ourselves the possibility to create new visions of the world we want through text and (moving) images. Speaking with filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary, curator Legacy Russell asked, “How do we care for Black women in the frame?”

The Loophole of Retreat’s origin comes from Harriet Jacobs, who lived in a space bearing that name after her self-manumission. Escape is the trigger, and the scheme is simple: when Black Americans come together, we must reflect on, as Toni Morrison queried, those for whom we are responsible. Like Jacobs’s, Morrison’s ghost floated above us during this retreat, especially as curator Negarra A. Kudumu reminded us, citing Morrison, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.”

I was honored to be one of the Black women invited to Leigh’s retreat, held on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, the former site of a monastery established in the tenth century. The hourly chimes of the church bells reminded us that we were on holy ground, rendering Leigh’s extension of the Pavilion into an artistic and scholarly communion.

It’s fitting that the scene replicated the elements I most adored about a Black church: people were dressed to the nines, with waist-long braids, multicolored locks, and a whiff of shea butter. As I sat in a crowd with hundreds of others, the person in the pulpit guided the audience through call and response. Bumbray led us into the three-day symposium through song and tambourine; in another presentation, cultural anthropologist Aimee Meredith Cox guided us through group meditation. Our bodies shifted in our chairs, our voices carried through the stone hall, and we discovered the wonder of what it meant to be alive and insightful.

Much different from a museum, where we view an art piece in isolation, perhaps with only the curator’s terse remark, this was an artistic pilgrimage where emerging and seasoned creatives were present. Most of us do not have the opportunity to meet our intellectual muses or to sit in a pew with other admirers, solely for the purpose of reflecting with gratitude.

The gathering was carved out of Black women in their full beauty and form, how the monuments—and, by extension, Black women—were made to resist society’s prejudices. But it went beyond that. This was a series of intellectual sermons directed by Black women, who, in different ways, were grieving, strategizing, and loving and wanted a community to accept them. But more than at a church, as scholar Saidiya Hartman remarked at the pulpit, “When Black women gather, we plot to undo the world.”

Art is more than the individual act of seeing; it is a collective act of doing, a tradition that newly emancipated enslaved African Americans carried out.

What was present at the retreat was feminist solidarity. The gathering was made possible by a historic event: in 2022, Simone Leigh was the first African American woman to represent the US Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. Her international recognition is unwavering, given that she is an avid artist who steadfastly puts community into her projects. That is to say, her production is not just a visual choice but is grounded on collaborating with intellectual powerhouses, most notably Black women scholars who move beyond the respectable and make space for wayward lives. Simone opened the door for Black women—including me—to be patrons of the Venice Biennale during a period when Black resistance also provided an intellectual imagination.

Leigh’s reverence for gathering Black women moves into different contexts, communities, and art practices outside the commercial art world. Her works were exhibited in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, and for a Guggenheim conference that year, she included African American scholars Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt among her co-conspirators. The Loophole of Retreat provided another iteration of their collaboration. In short, echoing the intellectual labor of Black feminists, the Loophole offered critical and caring lexicons that were not solely relegated to Black Americans. Contributions also came from the African diaspora, such as a reading by Ethiopian American writer Maaza Mengiste from her novel The Shadow King and clips presented by Brazilian film scholar Janaína Oliveira from Colectivo Mulheres de Pedra, an Afro-Brazilian collective whose work touches on the afterlife of enslavement.

From tangible mixed-media work to performance art, the artworks were richly exhilarated and undergirded by the spectacular. What we encountered at the Loophole was a collective praxis committed to remembering, reconstructing, and reconvening, with the goal of centering our elders.

For example, Annette Lane Harrison Richter, the great-great-granddaughter of Annetta M. Lane, one of the founders of the United Order of Tents, spoke about her ancestral lineage. Founded in 1867, the society was mainly composed of Black American women nurses who provided care to everyone, irrespective of racial background. As Lane Harrison Richter spoke, she portrayed Black women not solely as aggrieved objects plunged into despair but as unbounded majestic subjects exercising freedom. Artist Jessica Lynne and curator Oluremi Onabanjo crisply presented visual grammar for remembering. They showed us through performative oral collaboration that we can do so through photographs to show how the diaspora moves. From Lagos to Virginia, they created a map of their ancestors and illustrated how Black women are not just objects of photography but also archivists. Our stories move, even if we don’t. There is, as they noted, “an artistic task of monumentality.”

Black writers such as Toni Morrison, Lorraine Hansberry, Suzanne Césaire, and Zora Neale Hurston were cited and circulated precisely because they’ve had a towering presence in Black literature. They were passionate about capturing the lives of Black people and rendering them fully, with a taste of unapologetic honesty about Black beauty. They played with the languages they felt familiar with—from the French language to the Black American vernacular—with an acute sensibility. The message in their work is that they refused to be cowed by people who expressed shallow critiques of their work.

Occasionally, granular tears flowed toward people’s cheeks, on account of raw honesty from the pulpit. Some people wept when Vanessa Agard-Jones discussed her aunt, an elder who went from being an active writer to enduring bodily disintegration. Agard-Jones articulated a theory for what was happening: her aunt was going into the ground. A tussle between laughter and whimpering was cast when Sandra Jackson-Dumont discussed her mother, a confident Black woman who not only believed that she was the “bad bitch” but also turned her home into a curatorial enterprise—surrounding herself with the people who mattered most to her.

I cried, and not only because of the emotional layer that was activated. I cried because of the beauty in seeing Black feminist philosophy as a polysyllabic enterprise that was sedimented into every aspect of their lives.

Art can impart insight, displace anxiety, and redirect the eye from the mundane to the spectacle of life. For many good reasons, aesthetic vocations can also be founded in rebellion; likewise, they can be aligned with the elite. For the Afro-Italians I briefly spoke to, the trip to Loophole of Retreat was not a financial strain; however, those coming from South America or the African continent had to pull resources from universities and institutions to make it to Venice.

Art indulges, intermittently and imperfectly, a psychological desire to move beyond the arbitrary boundaries of life, and the questions around class, privilege, and access to these spaces reveal that Black people are not cut from the same cloth. Nevertheless, the Loophole of Retreat, as a symposium and art pilgrimage, showed everyone’s willingness to expand the notions of beauty and center people who have been historically overlooked.

Leigh has been applauded by the upper echelon of the art world, and her work invariably ends up speaking directly to her muses—Black women. Of course, the work can and should talk to other people, and the political statements, the history, and the aesthetic choices have the potential to move many souls. Many of the invited artists illustrated in real time that their scholarship and performance, in their complexity and beauty, can unfurl the restrictions that are often placed on Black women’s bodies. There is a global feminist art making that is conjuring freedom as an aesthetic practice. As the filmmaker Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich asked, “How do we create something that is not immediately valuable to capital?” That might mean demanding visibility for people who are often overlooked and offering them the opportunity to occupy spaces that were not designed for them, but doing so collectively. As the British writer Gail Lewis put it, “There is no end to coloniality and captivity, but there is a life after.” With hundreds of Black women and nonbinary people gathered at the Loophole of Retreat, what did that precisely mean?

The Fondazione Giorgio Cini in the former San Giorgio monastery, site of the retreat, is named for the son of Vittorio Cini, a late Italian industrialist who was a minister of communications, one of the wealthiest industrialists of his time, and deeply embroiled in the Italian fascist party during Benito Mussolini’s reign. As I write, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party leads a coalition in the Italian government, with far-right politicians holding power for the first time since World War II. When people conjured their ancestors, I was reminded that fascist and crypto-fascist elements of the Italian state have little to no respect for the Black people living in Italy or those risking their lives by crossing the Mediterranean Sea to reach it.

Shortly after returning to Berlin, where I live, I chatted with many of the Black women I knew, sharing what I felt that weekend and receiving compassion from Black women friends I have known for years and collaborated with through art and writing. Sharing my elation with a Nigerian American artist friend, I texted, “I’m flowing in Black feminist bliss. I love us. I love the compassion people were radiating. I loved having my soul filled about how I felt seen.” She replied, “I’m not surprised at all; a space for Black women at that scale and intellectual depth just hits different.” I quickly responded, with enthusiasm, “That’s it; when we get to dictate the terms on how we love each other and show up for each other, a weight is lifted, and our spirit can fly.”

These are the dialogues that I have been having for years, through texts, at dance parties in the early morning—mostly with friends and co-conspirators, people who dare to be part of a broader Black congregation. We get to determine who we want to be.

This article was commissioned by Tao Leigh Goffe.