Chloe Hooper grew up in Melbourne, Australia, and got her
undergraduate degree from Melbourne University. Then she got a Fulbright scholarship
and enrolled in Columbia's creative writing program. "I knew I wanted to live in New
York and write a novel," she said during a recent conversation at a downtown bookstore
café, "and the MFA was a good excuse for that." The program also provided her
with her first significant exposure to American literature, including authors like William
Faulkner and Phillip Roth that she now counts among her favorites. But the best part, she
smiles, was "living in New York and all the adventures I could have in this city. It's a good
place to learn about life." But Hooper's first novel, A Child's Book of True Crime,
couldn't be further from Manhattan. It's the story of Kate Byrne, a young woman teaching
elementary school in a small town in Tasmania. She's having an affair with the father of
one of her students, a man whose wife has recently published a true crime account of a
famous murder which took place in that town. Kate becomes fixated on the murder and the
book, and even as she's mentally reframing the murder as a children's story, complete with
talking animals, she starts to wonder if the wife isn't out to get her as well...
RH: Was the novel you wanted to write when you came to America the
story that became A Child's Book of True Crime?
CH: The story's taken some strange twists along the way, but I did have some
ideas about true crime which I never let go of. If you're looking for the extremes of
people's behavior, true crime gives you readymade stories about their desires and
ambitions. Their pathologies are totally laid bare. These stories can be an amazing mix of
the banal and the extreme. When I started to read in the genre, it struck me that the true
crime writer has a very delicate balancing act, trying to fulfill the reader's appetite for all the
gory details but also bending backwards to show their horror of the grisly deed.
RH: How did the children's version enter the equation?
CH: I thought true crime was ripe for satire, so I wanted to write a parody, but it
read too much like an actual true crime story and ignored all the pathos of the stories.
Meanwhile, I was working my way through grad school as a babysitter, reading children
bedtime stories... and lightning struck. Reframing the true crime sections as children's
book episodes let me tackle some of the perversities of the true crime genre. The funny
thing is that children's literature can be incredibly macabre and dark. Letting the Australian
animals in opened up the door for some of the sadder stuff.
RH: The Australian animals and other aspects of the region's natural
history are very prominently featured in the story. Was it difficult to write
about that area when you were at the opposite end of the planet?
CH: Being away from your home country can be a great gift. Lots of things
crystallize for you. But certainly I went home to take field trips down to Tasmania.
RH: How do Australian readers react? I would imagine they read it
very differently than American readers, especially since the setting is not
exotic to them.
CH: There's some geopolitics at work, though. Tasmanians don't really like
mainland writers coming over to write about their state, their experiences. So there've been
some negative reviews on that front. But I wanted to write about the feelings of isolation
and claustrophobia that can come up in a small town, the negative side of a small
community on a small island. It's easy to feel ostracized and freakish in that small a setting.
There's a lot of emphasis in reviews on her paranoia, the idea that she's gone mad, but I
don't see it that way. It's a bad episode [for her], that's all.
RH: You mention in the acknowledgments that you spent time with a
group of elementary school kids as part of your research.
CH: There was a weirdness to children's thinking that I felt I was missing, a little
edginess, so a teacher I knew in Melbourne let me into his classroom to talk to a group of
kids about truth. We talked about what truth is, when it might be appropriate to lie. They
loved it and wanted to go further, so we talked about death, and can we tell if we're really
awake or just dreaming, and what children's books would be like if children wrote them.
The differences between children and adults.
The passages in the book are almost verbatim from those transcripts, and the kids all knew
that I was talking to them for a book. Ironically, some reviewers say those are the only
unbelievable sections of the novel, that children don't speak like that. But I have it on tape.
RH: Will you continue to live in America?
CH: I'm not sure. I'd love to, but Melbourne is where my home and my family
are. Maybe New York's just a place to come for long visits.
RH: Have you started your next novel yet?
CH: I will this week, I promise! (laughs) I have lots of ideas, but I've
been traveling on the book tour for the last few months.
RH: Think you'll ever write about New York?
CH: I'm not sure. I'll have to work that out as I go along. I have the
characters, but I'm not sure where to put them.
