The Red Parts Read online

  Praise for The Red Parts

  “What feels tragic here is not the clinical recounting of Jane’s murder, but the effect it has had on the family…. Alternating between a narrative of the trial and a rambling exploration of her own life, Nelson examines the many stereotypes and clichés of murder, making it seem that no subject could possibly be more embedded in the American consciousness…. Nelson is refreshingly self-critical—of herself and her writing project. She never figures out what it is that compels her to sit at the trial, ‘jotting down all the gory details, no different or better than anyone else.’ Is it that she wants Jane’s life to matter, she wonders, or her own?”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A book-long riff on the first-person essay that Joan Didion built. A genre-buster with an engaging prose style, Nelson intertwines psychoanalysis, personal memoir, and true-crime tidbits into a darkly intelligent page-turner…. Nelson eschews tidy resolution. She argues that stories are by nature imperfect—and yet she also shows us how they can become totally worthwhile.”

  —Time Out

  “The Red Parts feels rushed, frenzied—in a positive, powerful way. While the re-opening of Jane’s case provides a plot, the book is also an autopsy, an examination (both implicit and explicit) on our cultural fascination with voyeurism, death, sex, and misogyny. Instead of distancing herself from these subjects, Nelson is fascinated by them, and acknowledges her complicity, her inability to escape from certain habits of thought, whether these be ‘murder mind,’ ‘suicide mind,’ or more everyday (though no less traumatic) ruts—her problems dealing with a junkie boyfriend, abandonment by her lover, getting along with her mother and extended family during the long process of the trial. In sum, The Red Parts is a tour de force.”

  —Pop Matters

  “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.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Nelson’s account is lucid, her head clear, and her writing strong. Memories of her childhood—particularly of her father, who died when she was a girl—are the most emotionally charged elements. But her wry and honest account of the clownish calamity of the courtroom and the impending media circus (Nelson was on 48 Hours Mystery) are also affecting…. A much-needed reminder of the long, painful aftermath of heinous crimes.”

  —Booklist

  “Very rarely does a book come along that combines such extraordinary lyricism and ethical precision with the sense that the author is writing for her very life. The Red Parts is one of these. At every turn of this riveting, genre-defying account, Nelson refuses complacency and pushes further into the unknown. A necessary, austere, and deeply brave achievement.”

  —Annie Dillard

  “In this book Maggie Nelson takes on the difficult and urgent task of paying close attention to something terrible, the murder of a family member. She also pays attention to the pitfalls of trying to know and say something true about this terrible event and its consequences. The beauty and importance of The Red Parts derives not only from Nelson’s astonishing skill with language, but from the bravery, generosity, and painstaking honesty with which she approaches her hard subject and her hard-won understanding of it.”

  —Matthew Sharpe

  “The Red Parts is a riveting read—Didion-esque in its tough clarity, its understatement, and its sheen. Like any great memoirist, Maggie Nelson is a born trespasser, with an exquisitely calibrated moral conscience. From nightmare she has constructed indelible literature.”

  —Wayne Koestenbaum

  The Red Parts

  Also by Maggie Nelson

  The Argonauts

  The Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning

  Bluets

  Women, the New York School, and Other True Abstractions

  Jane: A Murder

  Something Bright, Then Holes

  The Latest Winter

  Shiner

  The Red Parts

  AUTOBIOGRAPHY

  OF A TRIAL

  Maggie Nelson

  Graywolf Press

  Copyright © 2007 by Maggie Nelson

  Preface to paperback edition © 2016 by Maggie Nelson

  The author and Graywolf Press have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify Graywolf Press at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  First published in 2007 by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and through a grant from the Wells Fargo Foundation Minnesota. Significant support has also been provided by Target, the McKnight Foundation, Amazon.com, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

  Published by Graywolf Press

  250 Third Avenue North, Suite 600

  Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

  All rights reserved.

  www.graywolfpress.org

  Published in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-1-55597-736-8

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-55597-928-7

  2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

  First Graywolf Printing, 2016

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015953598

  Cover design: Kimberly Glyder Design

  This book is a memoir, which is to say that it relies on my memory and consists primarily of my personal interpretations of events and, where indicated, my imaginative recreation of them. Conversations and other events have been re-created to evoke the substance of what was said or what occurred, but are not intended to be perfect representations.

  For Christina Crosby and Janet Jakobsen,

  who train in the fire, and do the world justice.

  For there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that shall not be known.

  —LUKE 12:2

  In all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty.

  —NIETZSCHE

  Contents

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  Murder Mind

  An Inheritance

  The Face of Evil

  A Live Stream

  The Red Parts

  Addendum

  Red House

  American Taboo

  Murder Mind, Redux

  To Hell or Bust

  Sybaris

  After Justice

  The Book of Shells

  At the Tracks

  Gary

  Poetic License

  The End of the Story

  In the Victim Room

  Primetime

  Open Murder

  The Hand of God

  Coda

  Sources and Resources

  Acknowledgments

  Preface to the Paperback Edition

  At the opening of Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams, a devastating sliver of a book that Handke reportedly wrote in the two months directly following his mother’s suicide, he writes: “My mother has been dead for almost seven weeks; I had better get to work before the need to write about her, which I felt so strongly at her funeral, dies away and I fall back into the dull speechlessness with which I reacted to the news of her suicide. Yes, get to work…. As usual when engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine.”
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  The reopening of my aunt Jane’s murder case in 2005—though nowhere near as psychically catastrophic as a mother’s suicide—induced in me a remarkably similar mood. After attending the suspect’s trial in July 2005, I felt an intense rush to record all the details before being swallowed up, be it by anxiety, grief, amnesia, or horror; to transform myself or my material into an aesthetic object, one which might stand next to, or in for, or as the last impediment to, the dull speechlessness that makes remembering and formulating impossible. And so. After the trial, nel mezzo del camin, I set up shop in a city completely alien to me (Los Angeles), and wrote this account in a heightened, concentrated, occasionally reckless state of mind. A Sorrow Beyond Dreams sat on my desk throughout, as goad and guide. Yes, get to work.

  What effect do years, even decades, have on a piece of writing that self-consciously attests to the turbulent, raw, and rushed circumstances of its composition and publication? In the case of Handke’s book, the performance feels no less electric, but time has added to it a certain uncanniness—that of psychological exigency suspended eerily, beautifully, in that outside-of-time place that literature can create. I can only hope something of the same might be said of this new edition of The Red Parts, which has given me the dual gift of protecting the book (for the time being, anyway) from a different kind of dull speechlessness—that of unavailability—while also bringing into focus the book I always hoped The Red Parts might one day become: a peculiar, pressurized meditation on time’s relation to violence, to grief, thankfully untethered from the garish rubrics of “current events,” “true crime,” or even “memoir.”

  One aim I had while writing was to allow the events of the trial, the events of my childhood, the events of Jane’s murder, and the act of writing to share a single spatial and temporal moment. At one point in The Red Parts, this intermingling is imagined as a place, a “dark crescent of land, where suffering is essentially meaningless, where the present collapses into the past without warning, where we cannot escape the fates we fear the most, where heavy rains come and wash bodies up and out of their graves, where grief lasts forever and its force never fades.” I’m glad to say that the prescriptive severity of this image has receded for me, at least for the moment. But the importance of allowing oneself (of allowing myself, I should say) to stay in its grip for some real time has not. I’m grateful, once again, to send in this report from the field.

  Maggie Nelson

  Los Angeles, 2015

  The Red Parts

  Murder Mind

  WE HAVE EVERY reason to believe this case is moving swiftly toward a successful conclusion.

  These were the words spoken by a detective from the Michigan State Police, in a phone call to my mother, one afternoon in early November 2004. After hanging up with the detective, my mother called me and repeated the message.

  His words stunned me. As she said them I watched the hallway of my apartment tilt slightly downward, as if momentarily flirting with the idea of becoming a funhouse.

  His words had stunned her also. She received his call on her cell phone while driving, and immediately had to pull over to the side of the dusty road near her home in northern California to absorb their impact.

  The case in question was that of the 1969 murder of her younger sister, Jane Mixer, which had gone officially unsolved for the past thirty-five years. The detective said he had been working on it feverishly for the past five, but hadn’t wanted to call until an arrest was imminent. Which it now was.

  This news would have been shocking in and of itself, but its timing made it uncanny.

  For the past five years, I had also been working feverishly on my aunt’s case, albeit from a different angle. I had been researching and writing a poetry book about her life and death titled Jane: A Murder, which was just about to be published. I had no idea that Jane’s case had been active; my book was about a cold case abandoned by investigators long ago. It was about how one might live—or, rather, how my family lived, how I lived—under the shadow of the death of a family member who had clearly died horribly and fearfully, but under circumstances that would always remain unknown, unknowable.

  When I first meet this detective—Detective-Sergeant Eric Schroeder—at a preliminary hearing for the suspect, Gary Earl Leiterman, on January 14, 2005—he will greet me with a bear hug, saying, I bet you thought you were working on this alone all these years.

  Indeed, I had.

  I GREW UP knowing that my mother had a younger sister named Jane who had been murdered, but that was about all I knew. I knew Jane had been twenty-three when she died, and in her first year of law school at the University of Michigan. I knew my mother was twenty-five at the time, and recently married to my father. Neither my sister Emily nor I had yet been born. We were born in northern California, where our parents moved in the wake of Jane’s death—Emily in 1971, me in 1973.

  I had the vague sense while growing up that the deaths of other girls were somehow related to Jane’s murder, but I didn’t know how. Then one afternoon, home alone, around thirteen, looking for a book in my mother’s office, I spotted the spine of a book I’d never noticed before. Though nearly out of sight and reach, the garish, tabloid lettering, which read The Michigan Murders, stood out among the highbrow literary classics that my mother read and taught. I got up on a chair to pull the squat paperback down.

  This simple act carried its own legacy of trepidation, as the first of the many bones I broke as a child—in this case, a cracked elbow that occasioned reconstructive surgery and weeks spent motionless in traction—was the result of climbing a bookshelf in pursuit of a book. That accident had happened in a bookstore in Sausalito, the harbor town outside of San Francisco where I lived for the first few years of my life. I was only two at the time, but I remember a brightly colored rabbit on the book’s cover, and I remember wanting it desperately.

  After this accident I began to have a recurring dream. It was a dream of falling—or jumping—off the carport of our house in Sausalito onto the driveway, and hence to my death. I must have been dreaming this dream very young, threeish. In the dream a crowd of people come to look at my body, which lies at the bottom of the driveway as if at the base of a steep Greek amphitheater. It is difficult to remember the tone of the dream now: I remember horror at my action, a sense of detachment, a deep sadness, and some discomfort in watching my body be scrutinized as a corpse.

  The cover of The Michigan Murders depicted a faux-photograph of a Farrah Fawcett-like model, half of her face peeling away to reveal an infrared negative. Its coloring and graphics, along with the furtiveness I felt in examining it, immediately brought to mind a certain issue of Playboy I had spent a great deal of time studying as a child in my father’s bathroom—the Valentine’s Day issue from 1980, featuring Suzanne Somers. I remember that my father had liked Suzanne Somers very much.

  I opened to the first page of The Michigan Murders and read: In a two-year period, seven young women were murdered in Washtenaw County, some in so brutal a fashion as to make the Boston Strangler look like a mercy killer.

  I flipped through the book anxiously, hungry to find something, anything, about Jane, about my family. I quickly gathered that all the names had been changed. But I suspected I was getting close when I read:

  A trooper had brought the 1968 University of Michigan Yearbook [to the crime scene], and the smiling likeness in it of graduating senior Jeanne Lisa Holder of Muskegon, Michigan, did bear a resemblance to the puffed face of the young woman stretched out lifeless in Pleasantview Cemetery.

  “Jeanne Lisa Holder” bore a resemblance to “Jane Louise Mixer.” One layer had begun to peel.

  YEARS LATER, while in the thick of researching and writing Jane, the problem was not too little information. It was too much. Not about Jane—her murder remained maddeningly opaque—but about the other girls, whose horrific rapes and murders were described in excruciating detail in newspapers from the period, several true crime books, and on many “serial killer
chic” Web sites. There were charts such as the one that appeared in the Detroit Free Press on July 28, 1969, titled “A Pattern of Death: An Anatomy of 7 Brutal Murders,” which organized the details under the categories “Last Seen,” “Where Found,” “How Killed,” “Other Injuries,” etc. The entries were barely readable.

  During this research I began to suffer from an affliction I came to call “murder mind.” I could work all day on my project with a certain distance, blithely looking up “bullet” or “skull” in my rhyming dictionary. But in bed at night I found a smattering of sickening images of violent acts ready and waiting for me. Reprisals of the violence done unto Jane, unto the other Michigan Murder girls, unto my loved ones, unto myself, and sometimes, most horribly, done by me. These images coursed through my mind at random intervals, but always with the slapping, prehensile force of the return of the repressed.

  I persevered, mostly because I had been given an end-point: the publication date of Jane, on my thirty-second birthday, in March 2005. As soon as I held the book in my hand, I would be released. I would move on to projects that had nothing to do with murder. I would never look back.

  The reopening of Jane’s case did away with these hopes entirely.

  IN THE FALL of 2004 I moved from New York City, where I had lived for many years, to teach for a year at a college in a small town in Connecticut. The town was aptly named Middletown: in the middle of the state, in the middle of nowhere. My apartment there was beautiful—the bottom floor of a rickety 19th-century house, forty times as large as any apartment I could have afforded in New York. I set up my desk in a lovely room that my landlady introduced to me as “The Ponderosa Room”—a mahogany-paneled sunroom with three walls of windows.