Polaroid Nights–book review

I can rant a day away about the plethora of novels that get their emotional punch by entertaining readers with rape and murder. What sort of twisted society are we that this is offered everywhere we turn? And we justify our enjoyment of it: watched it for the psychological drama, read it for the great writing. You have to say that. You can’t say I loved the excitement of thinking about vulnerable people being tortured.

I read Polaroid Nights over the weekend. Great characters, sparkling writing. But it’s the story of a serial rapist and murderer and the woman he stalks. I asked my publisher (from whose shelves I’d pinched the book) why such a good writer would make up a plot so clichéd. She told me it’s not made up. It’s real.

It was a bucket of cold water thrown in my face. Lizzie Harwood wrote this book to process her own trauma of being “that close” to the rapist and serial killer in Auckland, 1995. The one who, as in the story, breaks the catch on her bathroom window at 3am, pads through the house, cuts the phone lines, stands beside the sleeping girl. Tips her handbag onto the bottom of the bed and goes through the contents. He’s been scoping her for a while. He doesn’t rape her. Not with two in the house. But he sprays fear over everything. The fear she carries from that day forward, wondering, if she’s ever home alone, that he’ll be back.

In her Newsroom article in 2021, Harwood explains how she wrote ‘a hallucination of a novel’ to articulate her ordeal. “I worked on it stubbornly, never acknowledging what bubbled underneath, until early 2021 when I said it out loud in a writing course: It’s about a woman whose trauma makes her flee her bed to stay safe by Staying. Out. All. Night.”

In Polaroid Nights the girls stay out all night. They work, like thousands of young women, in hospitality. Betty serves fancy food and her bestie, Alabama, sings at a club. They turn up hungover, work double-shifts, forget to eat, drink to keep going. The bars and clubs close progressively over the night and they wander from one to the other, drinking and socialising with their tribe. Anyone who has worked in hospo knows you need time to come down from a busy shift. But the lining up of shots at every bar until daylight seems like girls not making good choices. These smart, articulate young women didn’t seem to be drinking as alcoholics. What stopped them simply calling it a night and going home?

This, for me, is the Me Too movement double-take. I didn’t believe the writer. I thought she was cleverly writing to tap my jaded emotional responses. An author looking for a fast track to my pulse rate accelerator. I might as well say: I didn’t believe her because women make up traumatic stories to get attention. Not a mistake I thought I’d make in 2023.

This story works because it is authentic. Rape and murder it is. Gratuitous it is not. The emotions and the reactions described come from a woman who knows the fear and doesn’t get all helpless, or suddenly dead sassy, but behaves irrationally and bewilderingly in a way that seems strange and then obvious in a way I should have seen, but didn’t, because young women, you know, they’re all emotional. And it’s a shout out to every woman whose experience is not articulated because there is so much fictionalised shit out there. The next man who writes a story about high heels clicking down a dark alleyway and women in short skirts stalked by serial killers should read Lizzie Harwood and go find a new topic.

Their stupid stories drown the authentic. The one’s not crying wolf.