‘Keep Her Sweet’ by Helen Fitzgerald

Fiction – Kindle edition; Orenda Books; 238 pages; 2022.

Australian writer Helen Fitzgerald writes slightly surreal and often blackly funny psychological thrillers mainly set in Scotland, where she lives.

Keep Her Sweet — her 15th novel — is a dark tale about a toxic family living in rural Australia.

Like most of her previous work, it doesn’t fit neatly into a box. It’s not strictly crime and it’s not strictly a psychological thriller either. In the past, the author has described her work as “domestic noir”, so that might give you some idea about where it fits.

At its most basic level, Keep Her Sweet is about a severe case of sibling rivalry that turns murderous, but it’s also a wider examination of taboo subjects, including family and psychological breakdown, criminality, drug use, violence, religious belief and dysfunctional relationships.

The author uses three intertwined narratives to tell her story, which is framed around a married couple, Penny and Andeep, empty-nesters who have downsized to a place in Ballarat.

The first narrative thread is about Camille, “the second-born” who moves back into the family home to save money; the second is about Penny, “the mum”, and the third is about Joy, “the therapist” the family hires when Cam and her older sister, Asha, come to blows.

Sisters behaving badly

The central focus is on the 20-something sisters who do not get along. Both have moved home — much to their parents’ dissatisfaction.

Asha wears a tag on her ankle, having belted up the religious pastor she was having an affair with, so there’s always a threat of violence in the air, and because she cannot leave the house without the tag going off, Camille is at her beck and call, running errands for her, buying booze and so on.

But for me, the more interesting story is the one about the two older women, Penny and Joy, both of whom are struggling with the burden of motherhood long into middle age.

Penny, who ends up kicking out her husband, resents her daughters because they haven’t left home and are infantilised to the point of behaving like teenagers.

Similarly, Joy has a 43-year-old daughter with a meth problem whom she constantly has to “rescue”. She’d love to return to her native England and spend her retirement close to her own sister, Rosie, but her obligation to her “druggie” daughter Jeanie always wins out and she never gets on the plane.

A dark turn

These multiple threads do restrain the pace of the story up until about the three-quarter mark. That’s when the book takes a very dark (and gruesome) turn and the urgency goes up a gear. I simply couldn’t turn the pages quick enough to find out what was going to happen next.

No, it’s not a high-brow read. I’m not even sure I’d call it fun. But Keep Her Sweet, with its witty one-liners and deeply unlikeable and narcissistic characters, shows us how easy it is to cross the super-thin line between civility and savagery.

This is a good palate cleanser, and the perfect read for those times you just want to check your brain at the door.