- Graywolf Press via Instagram
- Look at the half-tone dots on the text. What does it remind you of?
When you’re curious to a fault, true crime reading supplemented by Wikipedia rabbit holes is inevitable. True crime! It’s so scary. It’s so disturbing. It’s so… badly written. Unlike its slick multimedia siblings (Serial, The Jinx) and with a few notable exceptions (hi, Truman Capote), most true crime writing isn’t particularly well constructed. It’s workmanlike prose that gets the job done, but it isn’t good. At best, it’s inoffensive. At worst, it’s bruise-purple, which is annoying when you’re reading a romance novel, but can be downright creepy when you’re reading about unspeakable acts of violence.
So it’s good news for fans of literary true crime that Maggie Nelson’s 2007 memoir The Red Parts is getting an April 2016 reissue from Graywolf Press, one of the indie publishing world’s biggest small presses. First published by Free Press, The Red Parts is in part the story of Nelson’s aunt, Jane Louise Mixer, who was murdered at the age of 23 while a law student at the University of Michigan. For a long time, it seemed there would be no clear answers as to what happened to Jane, and Nelson found herself haunted by this piece of her own history. So she wrote a book about it, Jane: A Murder. But in 2004, just before Jane‘s publication, Nelson discovered that her aunt’s murder case had been reopened. The Red Parts—so named for the lines in the Bible spoken by Christ, and also for a color associated with women’s bodies and internal organs—is an account of the trial that followed, and deftly covers the day-to-day experience of going to court, the circus of the true-crime industry (hello, Court TV), the infuriating prevalence of violent misogyny, and the American media’s obsession with dead white women.
All of these concerns are depressingly evergreen, but The Red Parts has long been out of print—probably because it preceded Nelson’s breakthrough work of literary collage, Bluets, a book that’s gained enough of a nerdy, language-obsessed, heartbroken following to achieve small-press cult-classic status. (It’s excellent. It’s a book I love so much I’ve foisted it on all of my writer friends, my mother, people I’ve just met, and more than one ex-boyfriend. Now I’ll foist it on you. Go read it!) Graywolf also published Nelson’s most recent (and, I think, best) book, The Argonauts, which flows associatively between a highly personal examination of queer family-making and critical theory.
But if cross-genre writing isn’t your thing (it doesn’t have to be!), The Red Parts may be more your speed. It’s one of Nelson’s most conventional projects. That’s not a knock on it, either. Because while Nelson would go on to disrupt genre distinctions in later works, The Red Parts is evidence of her capacity to work effectively with narrative too. It’s true crime, but it’s written by a poet, and it shows. It’s frightening and sad and every word is stone-like, a solid projectile. It’s a traditional memoir, and it’s a great one.
Graywolf’s new release has a slightly different subhead and much-improved design—the half-tone dots in the cover text are evocative of the quality of photographs in a newspaper, a slightly-cloudy appearance unmistakable as the screen through which you’d typically see images of missing women in print. If you’ve ever followed press coverage of a murder, you’ll know exactly what I mean. Like Nelson’s prose, the design element is subtle, lean even, but as soon as you see what’s being referenced, it’s chilling. It’s impossible to look away.