MAGGIE NELSON: JANE and THE RED PARTS

Inquiry welcomes back writer, teacher and critic MAGGIE NELSON, here to talk about two books JANE (A MURDER) and THE RED PARTS (A MEMOIR). It was only as an adult that Ms Nelson discovered that her aunt, Jane, had been brutally murdered by a serial killer. Jane had been a brilliant student at the University of Michigan in the late 1960s, but her brutalized body was found in a remote rural cemetery. In JANE, Maggie Nelson attempts to let Jane speak for herself though long excerpts from Jane’s journals combined with Maggie’s uncovering how this shocking event had affected her family. Just as she was mailing in the manuscript for JANE, Michigan police call Maggie’s family to reveal that due to new DNA evidence they are about to arrest Jane’s killer decades after the crime. While JANE is poetic, deeply tragic and lyrical, THE RED PARTS (A MEMOIR) is a powerful, shocking, scary, gripping and brutally honest account of Maggie’s Nelson’s experience in court while trying to make some sense of this violent crime.