The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial

"I can’t possibly do justice to this book. I really can’t. It’s such an extraordinary book. She exposes herself as a writer and as a person. There’s no boundary for her whatsoever. We are very much in the modern world, in cold-case review territory. I think this was published in 2007. It’s an extremely candid memoir, written by someone directly involved in a murder case—the victim was her aunt. But also, because of the timing (she comes into the case 35 years later), she can be a dispassionate observer as well. Yes. In The Red Parts , she goes to court, she meets the cops, she sits through the trial. She talks about the decision whether to go to court or not, whether to look at the images of the post-mortem, which are being projected onto the court wall. She describes all the primary materials, sometimes in a very factual way—and then she goes on to engage with them in a very different and emotional way. It’s beautifully written. One thing that really resonated with me was when she talks about how many people are just completely unwilling to face their revulsion about what’s happened in cases. We’re just completely unwilling to confront the fact that someone has done something to someone else which we cannot possibly conceive of. I don’t recall exactly what she says on this, but my take on it is that many people immediately resort to the notion of evil, which puts clear water between this and humanity. You know: ‘They’re evil, and therefore I don’t need to worry about it because I’m not evil.’ We can rationalise it away. “Nelson expected to be confronted with a monster, and she just sees this innocuous person” There’s an interesting link to Hannah Arendt , the philosopher. She used the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe Eichmann during his trial in Israel. Maggie Nelson writes: “Where I imagined I might find the ‘face of evil,’ I am finding the face of Elmer Fudd.” She’s saying the same thing: she expected to be confronted with a monster, and she just sees this innocuous person and doesn’t know what to make of it. She comes up with this idea of bearing witness to the routine of the state: this process as a machine of prosecution and justice. All of this had enormous resonance for me. It’s a fantastic book—of the five, it’s probably my favourite. One of the things you have to learn quickly—or at least, I did—is that emotions should have little part to play in the work, although I can now engage with them in my writing. Not in the way that Maggie Nelson has, but at least to recognise them. While writing, I came across some really interesting cases that show that the police are far more emotionally driven than they would ever admit. There’s one case in particular—the murder of Rachel Nickell—where it’s very plain to me, having researched and written about it, that the a key driver of the investigation was affect. It wasn’t rationality—it was just the horror of the case. So emotion plays an enormous part here. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I imagine it is no different to being a nurse or a doctor: if you get hugely emotionally engaged with your patient, I can’t imagine you would do your job very well. So you do need to manage that, I guess, otherwise you end up like some people I know who, thirty years into the job, end up with PTSD. They get flashbacks of crime scenes they were at. Maggie Nelson is a layperson, but is also a very good observer. She used lots of factual stuff, but at its foundation it’s sort of ethnographic. She saw and she watched and she reflected. She doesn’t give us any flights of fancy in here—that’s not to say she didn’t use her imagination. What’s in this are some very pointed reflections on what people did then, what they are doing now, whether this process was the right thing to do, whether you should confront it or run away from it. It’s also riven with family tensions. The big issue is whether they’re going to be in court for the verdict: guilty or not guilty. She describes the tension in that process. She’s just a great writer."