Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane was murdered before Nelson was born. This is Nelson’s account of the murder trial that followed, 35 years after the crime.
The parts of the books about the murder trial and the reactions of Nelson and her family to it are quite riveting, but overall this book suffers from Nelson’s habit of over sharing. Do we really need to know that she enjoys being strangled during sex? That she cried so hard for three nights after a bad breakup that her friend shoved some sleeping tablets into her hand? She writes,”I am getting the bad feeling that my friends are growing tired of me. I am growing tired of me too.”
Well Nelson, that makes three of us.
This is typical of the kind of undergrad melodrama that slides into her writing too frequently:
”A few weeks later, in what would become one of our last conversations, the man I loved told me that while I was away at the trial he had gone swimming in a lake during a lightning storm, and had there had the sudden feeling that perhaps it was our fate to get fatally struck by lightning at the same moment, and thus the whole painful mess we now found ourselves in would evaporate for us both in the same instant. As he said this I pressed the phone close to my ear, as if to imprint his voice against the clay of my brain.”
My dear Nelson, rather than imprinting his voice into the clay of your brain, you should be running a mile from this man, as he sounds like a wanker.
Nelson is at her best when writing about her family, and especially her grandfather, and all the painful shocks and absurdities of a murder trial. She could spare us more on the topic of herself and her relationships.
Maybe she just needs a few more years under her belt before she becomes a more refined and evocative writer. I really hope that happens, as she has a lot of talent.
