what i'm reading: the red parts: a powerful, haunting memoir of trauma, loss, and the limits of justice

This is why I keep a running book list that is decades long. For more than 15 years, my list has included this note.

The Red Parts - Maggie Nelson - murder of aunt she never knew

The Red Parts was published in 2007. I never would have remembered it. But it remained on my list, and last month, I found it at Powell's. I'm not a fast reader, but I read this book in two sittings. I was riveted.

* * * *

In 1969, Jane Mixer was 23 years old, a law student at the University of Michigan. She was on her way to her parents' home to announce her engagement. She never arrived. When her body was found, it was clear she was murdered. 

Maggie Nelson was born four years later. Jane Mixer was her mother's sister. 

In 2004, Nelson was about to publish Jane: A Murder, a collection of poetry and research snippets about the aunt she never knew, and about her death. Out of nowhere, a bomb dropped: Jane's case -- unsolved for 35 years -- had been reopened. Then: an arrest, a trial, media attention. A re-opening of wounds. Fresh trauma.

*  *  *  *

Nelson never knew her Aunt Jane, but her life was profoundly affected by her murder. The echoes of Jane's horrific death reverberated through her life and the lives of everyone in her family.

When Maggie Nelson wrote this book, I don't think the expression intergenerational trauma was commonly used, and Nelson never refers to her family's situation in such clinical terms. But this book is a view of intergenerational trauma from the inside -- from deep inside.

Although the subtitle of this book is "The Autobiography of a Trial", The Red Parts is more memoir than trial reporting. Although there is an investigation, a court room, a jury, an autopsy report -- and autopsy and crime scene photographs, which the family must decide whether or not to view -- and although producers of true-crime TV are already re-packaging the story into a series of clichés -- the book is not a procedural or a legal thriller. It is a profoundly emotional recounting of how trauma plays out in our lives. 

It's very difficult to write clearly about emotions, to bring a reader close to an emotional truth without resorting to melodrama, hyperbole, or cliché -- without being gruesome, but without pulling punches. Nelson comes as close as any writer I've ever read: raw, unflinching, self-aware, humbled and sometimes overwhelmed by the responsibility she has taken on. She is brutally honest, and courageously revelatory about her own life. How much of what she reveals was the result of the trauma of Jane's murder is left for the reader to contemplate.

Threaded through the book is an undercurrent: the author's thoughts on justice -- what passes for justice in the legal system, what real justice might look like, questioning whether justice can ever truly exist. There is no soapbox, no lecture, no statistics. Nelson simply questions everything, interrogating the popular conceptions of healing and closure, and the relative value our society places on certain lives. Her conclusions are only more questions.

I'm grateful to Maggie Nelson for her opposition to the death penalty, and for her recognition of the relative value of lives as reflected in the media. But mostly I'm in awe of her writing and grateful for her honesty.