Through the mirror: Proximity and subjectivity in writing Larrimah

In this chapter, the authors interrogate their experience “slipping” through the mirror of objectivity during four years undertaking research for a true-crime podcast and book. Using frameworks from critical auto- and duoethnography to create a layered, “messy” text (Ronai 1995), the authors integrate vignettes related to their experience of true crime reporting with critical perspectives, research, and other writers’ self-reflexive accounts. This chapter layers and tangles the intimacies of the practice of true crime reporting. It interrogates issues of proximity, subjectivity, and ethics in true crime writing through a gendered lens, from both inside and outside the research and writing/production process. It focuses on a range of competing practical and theoretical proximities that have ethical implications for true crime reporting: the proximities of place, form, time, audience, source, gender, and story.