Meretricious? Maybe. But compelling.
Addicted to true-crime pulp and incisive literary memoir? Poet Nelson serves up both.
The author never met her aunt, Jane Mixer, who was murdered in 1969 before Nelson was born. Police thought that Mixer’s death was one of the “Michigan Murders,” serial killings of a group of young women. John Norman Collins was put in prison for one of those deaths but was never conclusively linked to Mixer’s murder. Around 2000, Nelson began writing a collection of poems entitled Jane: A Murder. In it, she rehearsed the crime itself and teased out the myriad ways Mixer’s violent death indelibly marked Nelson’s own family. The poet was stunned when, as the book was just about to be published in late 2004, a cop called her and said he had been working on Mixer’s case. The police now believed Collins had not killed Jane Mixer; they’d fingered a new suspect, Gary Leiterman, who was soon arrested. Nelson chronicles the summer of 2005, which she and her mother spent in Ann Arbor sitting through Leiterman’s trial, drinking glass after glass of wine each night. The trial itself is grueling: Detailed discussions of DNA and physical evidence, like Aunt Jane’s underwear, all concretize the horror of the crime. That same summer, Nelson was also processing the end of an intense romantic relationship, and her over-the-top descriptions of her brokenhearted despair seem out of place in this otherwise subtle narrative. Among the book’s luminous moments: a stirring portrait of the woman who discovered Jane’s body and was so traumatized by the event that 30 years later her doctor forbid her to testify; a conversation over margaritas with the man Jane was dating when she was killed; Nelson’s grandfather “cracking apart with animal sobs” after the verdict was announced.
Meretricious? Maybe. But compelling.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 1-4165-3203-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2007
PROFILES
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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