For years, she has irresistibly collected "countless blue stones, blue shards of glass, blue marbles, trampled blue photographs peeled off sidewalks, pieces of blue rubble from broken buildings", and relentlessly noticed blue scenery ". In adulthood, her affections consolidated around a single colour.
In The Red Parts, the author relates how, as a child, she'd asked for her bedroom to be decorated with "everything in rainbows". The result is a victim impact statement as complex and perplexing as the case itself, as gripping as the “garish” genres it succeeds in circumventing. There is always another layer she scratches them away with teeth and fingernails. This uncertainty and vulnerability are what is so special about Nelson’s writing. In a preface to mark the book's American reissue, Nelson described it as "a peculiar, pressurized meditation on time's relation to violence, to grief, thankfully untethered from the garish rubrics of 'current events', 'true crime', or even 'memoir'." The Red Parts was written in its aftermath and first published in 2007, then again in 2015. In the summer of 2005, Nelson and her mother attended the trial of Gary Earl Leiterman – a retired nurse and grandfather with an addiction to painkillers. Over the years, Nelson developed an affinity with her murdered aunt, and late in 2004, she was about to publish a collection of poems based on Jane’s diary entries when, with uncanny timing, she discovered that Michigan state police were preparing to make an arrest in the reopened case. One night in 1969, Jane Mixer – the author's maternal aunt and a student at the University of Michigan – was shot and strangled to death, her body abandoned in a cemetery. But little is simple about the case, which had been cold for more than 30 years, or Nelson's approach to recounting it. The Red Parts is, in simplest terms, an account of a murder trial. On the back of its success, two of her earlier and equally difficult-to-classify books are being published for the first time in the UK: The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial and Bluets. part philosophical manifesto, gender treatise, fragmented novel, memoir, love letter and art critique" – won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in the US and became an instant cult classic.
In 2015, Maggie Nelson's ninth book, The Argonauts – described in this paper by Sinéad Gleeson as "a profound and challenging work.
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