The red parts A memoir

Maggie Nelson, 1973-

Book - 2007

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Subjects
Published
New York : Free Press [2007]
Language
English
Main Author
Maggie Nelson, 1973- (-)
Physical Description
201 pages
ISBN
9781416532033
  • 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
Review by New York Times Review

The murder of Maggie Nelsons aunt cast a long pall on those she left behind. IN March 1969, Jane Mixer, a 23-year-old University of Michigan law school student, signed up on a campus ride-board to travel home for spring break. Soon after, her body was found with two bullets in her brain and a stocking so ambitiously wound around her neck that her head was nearly severed. The killer decorated the corpse with Jane's belongings, in an effort almost as laborious as the ones undertaken over the next three decades to make sense of her murder. "The Red Parts," Maggie Nelson's memoir of her aunt Jane's killing, which was one in a series that was labeled "the Michigan Murders," opens with a quotation from Nietzsche: "In all desire to know there is already a drop of cruelty." These words take us directly into Nelson's conflicted psyche. A 34-year-old poet, she never met Jane, yet became so obsessed with her death she fell prey to what she calls "murder mind." By day she researches rhyming words for "skull" and "bullet." By night she is assailed by sickening images with "the slapping, prehensile force of the return of the repressed." But she is ripped from her grim reveries when an investigator announces that - thanks to a DNA match - Jane's unsolved case has been reopened and that an arrest, 35 years after the crime, is imminent. Nelson's stunned family is soon packed into an Ann Arbor courtroom alongside "true crime" writers and Court TV reporters streaming autopsy photos live on the Web. Joining them are several half-deaf, '60s-era retired cops and detectives who find themselves navigating the modern world of energetic, female DNA experts, jurors who must swear they understand the difference between reality and "Law & Order" and a family member who Googles the accused. At one point, Nelson writes, a detective pulls a bloodstained towel from "its cardboard evidence box, as if retrieving a piece of flotsam floated in from the far, dark banks of the River Styx. The fabric of reality had to tear a little to allow it into it." Still, what feels tragic here is not the clinical recounting of Jane's murder, but the effect it has had on the family. As a teenager, Nelson bathed in the dark with coins over her eyes; her sister became a fan of snuff films. Hearing the verdict, Nelson's aloof grandfather (Jane's father) crumples under "waves of pain, a very old pain that perhaps he himself did not know he housed." 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. If Nelson isn't musing about the regular-Joe-turned-ax-murderer, she's describing the expectation that her family will "print up T-shirts with Jane's picture and a 'we will never forget' slogan." When staring at the accused, she writes: "Where I imagined I might find the 'face of evil,' I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd." Nelson becomes distracted from Jane's story by a failed love affair, which becomes off-putting because we get to know her partner only as "the man I loved." And vague, panicked explorations of the meaning of life and her "disassociated, heartbroken fog" will be hard for any reader to sympathize with. But even at her weakest emotionally, 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? Eve Conant is a writer for Newsweek.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

Nelson's aunt, whom she never met, was brutally killed in 1969 and thought to be part of the infamous Michigan Murders. Three decades later, DNA evidence leads investigators to a new suspect on the eve of the publication of Nelson's own personal investigation, a book of poetry about her aunt titled Jane (2005). This causes Nelson to reexamine the effect her aunt's murder had on her family and their habits (an understandable aversion to violence against women in movies, for example). Alternating between the current trial and her family history, 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. Given the popularity of crime TV, this is a much-needed reminder of the long, painful aftermath of heinous crimes. --Emily Cook Copyright 2007 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Addicted to true-crime pulp and incisive literary memoir? Poet Nelson serves up both. The author never met her aunt, Jane Mixer, who was murdered in 1969 before Nelson was born. Police thought that Mixer's death was one of the "Michigan Murders," serial killings of a group of young women. John Norman Collins was put in prison for one of those deaths but was never conclusively linked to Mixer's murder. Around 2000, Nelson began writing a collection of poems entitled Jane: A Murder. In it, she rehearsed the crime itself and teased out the myriad ways Mixer's violent death indelibly marked Nelson's own family. The poet was stunned when, as the book was just about to be published in late 2004, a cop called her and said he had been working on Mixer's case. The police now believed Collins had not killed Jane Mixer; they'd fingered a new suspect, Gary Leiterman, who was soon arrested. Nelson chronicles the summer of 2005, which she and her mother spent in Ann Arbor sitting through Leiterman's trial, drinking glass after glass of wine each night. The trial itself is grueling: Detailed discussions of DNA and physical evidence, like Aunt Jane's underwear, all concretize the horror of the crime. That same summer, Nelson was also processing the end of an intense romantic relationship, and her over-the-top descriptions of her brokenhearted despair seem out of place in this otherwise subtle narrative. Among the book's luminous moments: a stirring portrait of the woman who discovered Jane's body and was so traumatized by the event that 30 years later her doctor forbid her to testify; a conversation over margaritas with the man Jane was dating when she was killed; Nelson's grandfather "cracking apart with animal sobs" after the verdict was announced. Meretricious? Maybe. But compelling. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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 endpoint: 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. In early October, about a month before Schroeder's call, I sent galleys of Jane to my mother for her sixtieth birthday. I was nervous; I knew the book would immerse her in the details of a story she'd been trying to put behind her for thirty-five years. More than nervous -- I was terrified. As I addressed the package to her in California, it occurred to me that the book might not constitute a gift at all. If she hated it, it could be construed as a birthday-ruining disaster, a bomb, a betrayal. I was hugely relieved when she called me after finishing the manuscript. She was in tears, saying she would be eternally grateful both to it and to me. She said it was a miracle: even though I never knew Jane, somehow I had managed to bring her back to life. This felt like a miracle to me too. I never thought "my Jane" might approximate the "real Jane"; I never even had designs on such a thing. But whoever "my Jane" was, she had certainly been alive with me, for me, for some time. The book's cover had been designed and pinned to my wall for months, and a defiant, androgynous, starkly lit, close-up photo of Jane's face at thirteen, taken by my grandfather, stared me down daily. The book also contained many diary entries I had culled from Jane's own writings, so copyediting the manuscript -- which is what I had been doing when my mother called that November afternoon -- involved paying as close attention to Jane's voice as I paid to my own. To make sure I had her right, I had unearthed Jane's original journals, and it was not unusual that fall to find me sitting on the dark wood floor of the Ponderosa Room in a sea of pages filled with her elegant handwriting. In returning to them I was newly struck by their tormented insecurity (often manifesting itself in torrents of rhetorical, self-reprimanding questions), which contrasts starkly -- sadly, even -- with her obviously deep powers of articulation and feeling. This contrast runs through all her writings, from her childhood to her college years. More than runs through them -- it is their very engine. It was, in fact, what made me want to write about her in the first place, as much as, or more than, the weird and awful circumstances of her death. Never be afraid to contradict yourself. But what is there to contradict? Could I after all be very stupid -- and very wrong? You're a good kid, Jane. Good for what? Who am I to judge? What was 1965? What's been learned? What's been gained? Lost? Loved? Hated? What do you really think? How do you explain yourself? Why don't I ever know what I'm going to be tomorrow? What right have we to happiness? I recognized myself here, although I did not want to. I would have rather chalked Jane's self-doubting agonies up to the conundrum of growing up an effusive, probing, ambitious girl in the sedate, patriarchal '50s -- a conundrum that several decades of feminism were supposed to have dissolved and washed away by the time I came across her words. And now a detective had called to say that there had been a DNA match in her case, and they were sure they'd found the right guy -- a retired nurse who had nothing to do with John Norman Collins, the man who was convicted in 1970 of the final Michigan Murder, and whom most had always assumed responsible for all. Schroeder told us that this new suspect was now under surveillance, and would be arrested within a few weeks. They had every reason to believe that the case would then move swiftly toward a successful conclusion. Leiterman was in fact taken into custody on the charge of open murder on the day before Thanksgiving, 2004, and then held, without bail, until his trial, which began on July 11, 2005, and ended on July 22, 2005. But over these eight months, the dread that had accompanied my initial forays into Jane's story did not dissipate. It shape-shifted. It grew. As winter descended in Middletown, the sunroom became the snowroom, and murder mind was back. In the morning I would pretend to know how to teach Shakespeare to fresh-faced undergraduates, then return home to talk on the phone to homicide cops and sift through the stack of books I'd checked out from the university's Science Library to try to keep up with the developments in Jane's case: DNA for Dummies, clinical psychology textbooks with titles like Sexual Murder: Catathymic and Compulsive Homicides. I flipped through the case studies in Sexual Murder only once but still felt as though they might have given me a fatal disease. At night I often found myself up late, unable to sleep, pacing around the Ponderosa Room in my pale blue bathrobe, a tinkling glass of whiskey and ice in my hand, watching the snow mount menacingly around the windows. I began to feel like a ghost, a stranger to myself. It wasn't quite as bad as The Shining, but sometimes it felt close. At least Jack Nicholson had a family to witness and rue his descent. At more jocular moments I felt like John Berryman -- a throwback, a poet trapped in a gothic college town, some scraggly miscreant academic who went to dreary parties, swapped wives, and occasionally defecated, blind drunk, on a colleague's lawn. Except that in Middletown there were no such parties. In short the ideal of catharsis that had served as a naive but real spur throughout my writing of Jane began to crack at the seams, and reveal itself as the ruse I had suspected it to be all along. My identification with my aunt -- which had been the main thread of Jane, and which was arguably a result of mistaken identity on the part of my grandfather, who has called me "Jane" instead of "Maggie" for as long as I can remember -- began to feel like either a hoax or a horror. I had started writing Jane with the presumption that my family's repression of her awful death was an example of faulty grieving, which my book could delicately expose as an unhealthy vestige of a Midwestern, Scandinavian heritage -- a grim Ingmar Bergman scenario getting played out in the small, lakeside town of Muskegon, Michigan -- and that I could offer a more successful model in its place. The hubris of this idea is now abundantly clear to me. When I think now about "faulty" or "successful" grieving, I feel only bewilderment. Beyond the bewilderment, the edge of a shapeless, potent rage -- a rollicking protest, some loose, hot, wild event starting to take place under my skin. Photo #1: A ring of male detectives standing around the shrouded lump of Jane's dead body. Taken from behind the chain-link fence, looking into Denton Cemetery. The picture cuts off around the men's waists, so all you see of them is a row of trench coat bottoms and matching black shoes. Jane's body lies at their feet, her head and upper body shrouded by her raincoat. One of her arms strays out from under it, ghostly white, flung above her head, as if she were not dead, just completely exhausted. Copyright (c)2007 by Maggie Nelson Excerpted from The Red Parts: A Memoir by Maggie Nelson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.