The Red Parts
Ratings11
Average rating4
In 1969, Jane Mixer, a first-year law student at the University of Michigan, posted a note on a student noticeboard to share a lift back to her hometown of Muskegon for spring break. She never made it- she was brutally murdered, her body found a few miles from campus the following day.The Red Parts is Maggie Nelson's singular account of her aunt Jane's death, and the trial that took place some 35 years afterward. Officially unsolved for decades, the case was reopened in 2004 after a DNA match identified a new suspect, who would soon be arrested and tried. In 2005, Nelson found herself attending the trial, and reflecting with fresh urgency on our relentless obsession with violence, particularly against women. Resurrecting her interior world during the trial - in all its horror, grief, obsession, recklessness, scepticism and downright confusion - Maggie Nelson has produced a work of profound integrity and, in its subtle indeterminacy, deadly moral precision.
Reviews
Popular Reviews
Reviews with the most likes.
I have become a fan of Maggie Nelson's writing. This book is sort of true crime, but mostly an interior view of the author's experience. The Ann Arbor connection surprised me; I hadn't picked up on it before.
“He looked like he was trying to leep a straight face, but was about to jump up and call the whole thing off. I am immortal until proven not! I looked at him long enough to be sure that this was not the case. Then I told him I loved him, kissed his face, and walked out of the room.”
I've been meaning to get around to Maggie Nelson's Argonauts for the longest time but I was in the mood for true crime and had this book to hand so it snuck in first, and it turned out to be a great introduction to her work. Nelson writes unflinchingly about the brutal murder of her aunt in 1969, and the trial, almost forty years later, of the man who murdered her, which Nelson attended along with the rest of her family. As always, I have so much admiration for people who can go through these traumatic experiences and process them in such a way that the outcome is something beautiful, like this book. I read it twice because I was so caught up in Nelson's writing the first time through - her incredibly frank autobiographical passages are particularly hypnotising - that I missed some of the important details of the case. It's a beautiful tribute to the aunt that Nelson never got the chance to know.
