The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial: Summary & Key Insights

It began with a phone call. For over thirty years, my family had lived with uncertainty about Jane’s murder, which occurred in 1969 when she was a graduate student at the University of Michigan. The police had long shelved the case; it was a wound turned into an absence. When I received news that new DNA evidence had matched a suspect, the crime was suddenly back among the living. It would be tried in court. We would be asked to play our parts again — this time, as witnesses, as survivors, as the living evidence of a forgotten story.

This resurgence forced me to confront what I thought I already understood about grief. It wasn’t simply the pain of loss; it was the intrusion of the public into the private. Reporters called. Old details resurfaced. Friends wanted updates. Everything became a double exposure: the past bleeding through the present. I realized that although my earlier book had tried to preserve Jane’s voice, the world still preferred her silence — the silence of a victim who could be consumed without resistance. The reopening of the case made clear that this craving for narrative resolution, for an ending, often obscures the contemporary violence of telling such tales.

Returning to Ann Arbor for the trial, I found myself uneasy about what my presence meant. Was I there to seek justice or to feed an old obsession? In the courtroom, I watched strangers sift through my family’s history. Each forensic photograph, each piece of testimony, was meant to transform the unthinkable into evidence, into a story the law could recognize. But Jane’s life — the shimmering person I tried to reconstruct through letters and poems — remained outside the frame. What was being judged was not her, but the cultural ritual that reenacts female death for reassurance, for order, for closure. I began to see that this resurrection was not just about solving a crime. It was a mirror held up to how America consumes violence, especially when it happens to women.

My mother and I sat side by side during the trial. She is Jane’s sister, and she carries a kind of pain I can only partly comprehend. Our relationship is its own quiet story within this book — one shaped by inherited sorrow, by the silent transmission of trauma, by the push and pull between wanting to know and wanting peace.

In the slow rhythms of courtroom life, I watched how differently we navigated grief. My mother often seemed serene, as if she had built a protective distance between herself and the proceedings. I, on the other hand, could not stop analyzing, picking, interpreting every gesture and utterance. The courtroom amplified our differences: she felt the exhaustion of survival; I felt the compulsion to understand. Through her, I glimpsed the limits of intellectual inquiry when faced with raw human endurance.

Our shared presence also made visible a generational dialogue about women and violence. My aunt’s murder had occurred at the dawn of second-wave feminism, when women were beginning to name the everyday violences they endured. Decades later, I found myself immersed in a culture both obsessed with and numbed to such stories. Sitting with my mother, I felt the collision of these two eras — their hopes, their failures, their repetitions. We were witnesses not just to a criminal act but to the long arc of how society treats women’s pain.

At times, I resented how the trial forced our private bond into public performance. People expected us to play prescribed roles: the grieving mother-figure; the literary niece turning tragedy into art. But inside that exposure, there were moments of profound honesty — small glances, shared silences — where love persisted beyond the spectacle. Writing about these moments became a way of acknowledging the truth that every family story contains both tenderness and rupture. My mother and I could not save each other from the past, but in the courtroom, we shared a language of endurance that no verdict could erase.