The Red Parts
Autobiography of a Trial
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4.1 • 23 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Late in 2004, Maggie Nelson was looking forward to the publication of her book Jane: A Murder, a narrative in verse about the life and death of her aunt, who had been murdered thirty-five years before. The case remained unsolved, but Jane was assumed to have been the victim of an infamous serial killer in Michigan in 1969.
Then, one November afternoon, Nelson received a call from her mother, who announced that the case had been reopened; a new suspect would be arrested and tried on the basis of a DNA match. Over the months that followed, Nelson found herself attending the trial with her mother and reflecting anew on the aura of dread and fear that hung over her family and childhood--an aura that derived not only from the terrible facts of her aunt's murder but also from her own complicated journey through sisterhood, daughterhood, and girlhood.
The Red Parts is a memoir, an account of a trial, and a provocative essay that interrogates the American obsession with violence and missing white women, and that scrupulously explores the nature of grief, justice, and empathy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The grisly 1969 Michigan murder of 23-year-old law student Jane Mixer is evocatively re-examined here by her niece, poet Nelson, in light of new evidence in the case. Just as Nelson was completing a book of poetry about her aunt in 2004 (Jane: A Murder) after 35 years of a closed case for which John Collins had been convicted in 1970 new DNA evidence linked a retired, now elderly nurse, Gary Leiterman, to Mixer's murder. Nelson's intimate memoir chronicles how she and her mother, older sister Emily and grandfather managed to harness their emotional pain and "bear witness" at the Ann Arbor trial and conviction of Leiterman. Nelson's search for answers in the murder of Mixer, who hitched a ride from a stranger and was shot twice at close range, strangled, then dragged to a cemetery, dilates into excruciating details about other cases of girls missing and mutilated. Nelson's cathartic narrative encompasses closure of unrelated events in her own life, such as mourning her dead father, dealing with a recent heartache and reconciling with her once-wayward sister. Her narrative is wrenching, though readers come no closer to understanding the character of Mixer or the motive for her murder.
