The call shocks Nelson, as she herself has spent the last several years investigated her aunt’s death as the subject of a poetry collection – 2005’s Jane: A Murder. In 2004, Nelson is contacted by a detective who has, unbeknownst to Jane’s family, been working on the case for the past five years: DNA evidence suggests that the killer was, in fact, one Gary Earl Leiterman, whose subsequent trial and conviction becomes the subject of The Red Parts (as well as of a rather lurid-sounding TV true crime show, 48 Hour Mystery, for which Nelson is interviewed). The Red Parts, then, is the telling of that trial, as well as, or even primarily, the analysis of Nelson’s own state of mind before, during, and subsequent to the trial it’s an essayistic exploration of what we might mean by justice, by trauma, by retribution, grief, anger and guilt, and it’s a story of a disintegrated family thrust together again, temporarily, under the eyes of the nation as the case unfolds.Īfter Jane died, it was commonly held that her murder was one of a number – the Michigan Murders – committed by serial killer John Collins, though Jane’s case itself was never official solved. And, indeed, the ‘autobiography’ in the book’s title isn’t Nelson’s own, but that of a trial: the belated murder trial of the man accused of killing Nelson’s twenty-three year old aunt, Jane Mixer, back in 1969. After the blazing critical success of Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts a couple of years ago (that book, her ninth, represented Nelson’s long-awaited breakthrough into the UK market), we’ve finally we’ve gotten hold of her 2007 memoir, The Red Parts – a text that, like The Argonauts, while it’s autobiographical, is nonetheless more contemplative and less arc-driven than the word ‘autobiography’ might suggest.

The argonauts maggie nelson sparknotes