Chekhov's Mistress

Jane {a murder}, by Maggie Nelson

by Bud Parr

I almost didn’t pick up Maggie Nelson’s book Jane {a murder}. The title and the photo on the cover said to me “this is not a book for you.” Looking at the back cover, phrases like “dark, female masterpiece,” “true story of a murder” and “blurred-genre memoir” all confirmed that this was a book to put on the bottom of the burgeoning stack. Somewhere inside of me though, I like to think there exists a sixth sense, a nagging intuition about good books that made me pick up Jane just to read a page or two. I didn’t put it down again.

Jane {a murder} is a classified as a book of poetry and a book of true crime. It is all things described, but none of those capture its singular purpose and its classification doesn’t matter when you read it. It’s a story well told of a woman brutally killed and another woman yearning to know more about the ever present shade of her murdered aunt. Jane was murdered in 1969 while a student at the University of Michigan. Four years later, Jane’s sister had a daughter who knew about her aunt, but never quite enough and certainly never about the night she was shot, which was just one in a series of media-sensationalized killings dubbed the “Michigan Murders.”


As an antidote to that sensationalism, Nelson explores Jane’s life and death with a poet’s sensibility through anecdotes, clippings and diary entries. Her skill as a poet is matched by the way she weaves these various elements together as a deft storyteller. In fact, the diary entries, which were written years before her murder are not all in chronological order, but seamlessly placed in the order, perhaps, of Maggie Nelson’s emotional discovery.


These two passages sit on facing pages. The first is Jane’s diary entry from 1966, around the age of twenty, three years before her death:


Careless dribble – again


Strange, lying in bed

unable to sleep


That’s all familiar

but the thoughts inside of me

are not


Questions, over and over

home too long, back too soon


alone, really alone


What are you like when you’re alone


ugly, heavy, disreputable

unsure, awake, useless


This room is hideous


The next page, titled “Hideous”, comes after Ms. Nelson has maybe come to know too much about Jane’s murder:


Unable to sleep, surrounded by

her words. Afraid, truly afraid


to tell you about my brain

chattering with cruelties-


When did she know

she was in danger;


the terrible little gun

flat against her head;


which shot first,

the front or the back?



The fear,

her fear


but I cannot imagine that.


Why keep trying?

I can hear you say. Well


I can’t help it. I just do. Then

to stop the thoughts, I imagine


two quick, dull shots

that come as a sort of relief. Don’t you know,


I recognize this

as hell.


I try to use the tricks I’ve learned to get through this-


Meditate on a wrathful deity.

Watch it melt into light.



And so I do, and find

that not even Kali


with her mouth full of blood

non Thor with his hammer


can take me away from here, where

your breath spouts out of you


and I listen.


Ms. Nelson took some license with Jane’s diary entries, at the least creating line-breaks, but she uses them to such great affect that they become Jane’s cries. What under normal circumstances are fairly typical reflections on youthful angst and self-doubt – “right now I hate my sister so…I am jealous of Barb’s fun, dates, looks, assurance…” – become here the private truths of a woman denied her life before she had a chance to work them out – “This kid doesn’t know anything. / She’d like to sleep the childish slumber of a baby and yet live in a world of complexities.” – through them we come closer to understanding her tragedy, not so much through pathos but empathy.


What makes the difference between pathos and empathy is restraint. That is a strength in this book. Halfway through we are led to the murder scene, the press and investigation, meditations on blood – “Can anyone like blood the way one likes the mountain or the sea” – the freaks that call Jane’s grieving parents – “Where’s Jane, boo-hoo-hoo” – and other detritus left in the wake of a brutal murder, like the psychic brought in to solve the case of the serial killer – “Her face was beat, beat, beat. It was wrinkled like a monkey’s.” But before she takes us too far down the path of “true-crime,” just when we start to feel like voyeurs getting too close, Nelson puts down the looking-glass and stops to breath – “Somehow I need to make it clear: none of these details belongs to me.” By then though, like stumbling across a dead body, we can’t forget what we’ve seen – “the imaginary is what tends / to become real, and when it does / there’s no paint black enough / to cover it up.”


In the beginning of the book, Nelson imagines the final moments of Jane’s life:


She had been shot once in the front and once in the back of the head. She wandered, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. She was not dead yet, but she feared she was dying.The holes in her head were perfectly round and bloodless, with burnt-flared edges, two eclipses. The passage of air through the holes felt peculiar, just dimly painful, like chewing hot or cold food on a cavity, the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full.


Sunlight shot around the circumference of each black rind, so that a long shaft of pale light cast out from the center of her forehead, and another shaft streamed behind her.


Is this the light of the mind? Is this the light of my mind?


This would be an easy passage to overdo, but I think it’s great. It tells us right in the beginning that the author has put herself as nearly as she can imagine into the shoes of Jane. And although Jane’s parents don’t figure prominently in the book, this piece, where she says “the sensation of space where it had once been dense and full” signifies their loss, the void where there was once a life.


Jane works so well because the poetry itself is nearly invisible. So much contemporary poetry tends to be too self-conscious to let its meaning work on you, but Maggie Nelson’s poems manage to both fluidly pull us through the story and stand alone – they are purposeful and poignant with no pretense. Indeed, I would classify Jane {a murder} as a page-turner.





Maggie Nelson…

Interview at Small Spiral Notebook

Interview at Here Comes Everybody


Buy it: Amazon, Powells


Detail Page at Soft Skull Press

posted July 14, 2005

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