The Red Parts

I have become a fan of Maggie Nelson's writing. This book is sort of true crime, but mostly an interior view of the author's experience. The Ann Arbor connection surprised me; I hadn't picked up on it before.

“He looked like he was trying to leep a straight face, but was about to jump up and call the whole thing off. I am immortal until proven not! I looked at him long enough to be sure that this was not the case. Then I told him I loved him, kissed his face, and walked out of the room.”

I've been meaning to get around to Maggie Nelson's Argonauts for the longest time but I was in the mood for true crime and had this book to hand so it snuck in first, and it turned out to be a great introduction to her work. Nelson writes unflinchingly about the brutal murder of her aunt in 1969, and the trial, almost forty years later, of the man who murdered her, which Nelson attended along with the rest of her family. As always, I have so much admiration for people who can go through these traumatic experiences and process them in such a way that the outcome is something beautiful, like this book. I read it twice because I was so caught up in Nelson's writing the first time through - her incredibly frank autobiographical passages are particularly hypnotising - that I missed some of the important details of the case. It's a beautiful tribute to the aunt that Nelson never got the chance to know.