Mixer Jane Louise - The red parts: autobiography of a trial

What feels tragic here is not the clinical recounting of Janes 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 clichs of murder, making it seem that no subject could possibly be more embedded in the American consciousness. Nelson is refreshingly self-criticalof 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 Janes 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 imperfectand yet she also shows us how they can become totally worthwhile.

Time Out

The Red Parts feels rushed, frenziedin a positive, powerful way. While the re-opening of Janes 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) rutsher 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

Nelsons 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

Nelsons account is lucid, her head clear, and her writing strong. Memories of her childhoodparticularly of her father, who died when she was a girlare 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 Nelsons 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 readDidion-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.

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