Finding Jane: Lyric Individualism, True Crime, and Maggie Nelson’s Multiplicity

He wants to know why I’m so passionate about Jane, why I want to write about her. Why I would want to take private things and put them into the world.

Maggie Nelson, Jane: A Murder

On March 20, 1969, Maggie Nelson’s aunt Jane disappeared. Seeking a ride to her family home in Muskegon from the University of Michigan for spring break, Jane Louise Mixer had posted a note on a community bulletin board and, on the designated evening, was picked up by the responding driver. The next morning, a local woman found the twenty-three-year-old law student strangled, dead, leaning against a tombstone in a cemetery off the side of the road. “[F]our years later, almost to the day,” Nelson was born (Jane 28). In 2005, at the start of a new century, a new millennium—and after a new suspect was charged with the crime—she published a collection of poems titled Jane: A Murder, an attempt to grapple with the loss of the aunt she never met and the truths she left behind. Nelson’s interest in her aunt’s murder began when she herself was twenty-three years old, the cosmic force of recurring dreams pulling them together after Nelson discovered her aunt’s old diaries, initially mistaking them for her own.

This encounter propels Nelson toward an exploration of her aunt’s disappearance and murder through lyrical meditation and experimentation. In Jane and the follow up The Red Parts (2007), Nelson commits to a praxis of continued return, a method for examining not just the lyrical “I,” but the world that encapsulated that “I.” In Nelson’s case, this world comprises not just the most obvious spectacle of her aunt’s murder nor the personal present tense in which she discovers it. In fact, these lyrical experiments allow Nelson to explore the network of personal history, shared grief, and intimate connections which the lyrical “I” “lean[s] against” (Nelson, “Sort of Leaning” 83). The work, contexts, and artifacts of others construct “a way to view the world” (Dicinoski 2) rooted in associative conversations between interlocutors, contextualized in the fragmentary form of her poetics.

Thus far, most discussion of Nelson has focused on her more recent bestselling The Argonauts (2015) and the cult and critical favorite Bluets (2009), but Jane marks a shift in Nelson’s poetic style—the work in which she goes from “being a versifier to being a writer who plays with prose and remakes the genre” (Als).¹ Jane inaugurates Nelson’s commitment to a formalism that searches—as well as any literary work can—for a representational mode to match the complexities of life under late capitalism. The text “acknowledge[s] the status of . . . the self as socially enmeshed” (Lerner), especially with regard to the connection between private life and the driving force of individualism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the stranger-than-fiction series of events that followed in the immediate aftermath of the eponymous collection’s publication. Shortly after Jane’s release, DNA evidence reopened Jane Mixer’s case, resulting in a surge of “true crime” intrigue about Nelson’s aunt (Molotkow). The trial of the new suspect catapulted Nelson further into the murder than even she expected—out of her own personal musings and the “archives” of her aunt’s dusty journals and into the immediate mystery of CBS’s 48 Hours (“Deadly Ride”), resulting in another volume, The Red Parts, written alongside Nelson’s daily attendance at court. In general, Jane: A Murder is considered a continuation of Nelson’s poetic output—following her first two collections, Shiner in 2001 and The Latest Winter in 2003, all published with small presses—with The Red Parts marking a more obvious venture into narrative prose, followed as it is by Bluets and then, the most well-known Argonauts (Molotkow). But it is Jane: A Murder that serves as the experimental and generic transition point. Not just because of its inextricable thematic ties to The Red Parts, but on its own terms...