Jane

Maggie Nelson's jane: a murder is a hybrid memoir that blends poetry, prose, diary excerpts, dream sequences, and true crime research to reconstruct the life and unsolved murder of Nelson's aunt, Jane, a University of Michigan senior who had been accepted to law school when she was killed near the campus in 1969. The book traces Nelson's investigation into a woman she never met but whose death shaped her family for decades.

The work opens with four interconnected prose-poem dreams titled "The Light of the Mind." In the first, a woman shot in the front and back of the head wanders, trying to find someone to remove the slugs from her skull. Light pours through the bullet holes but leaks away. Subsequent dreams transform the image: A woman watches a freckle on her forehead darken into a hole, then wakes to find it gone and sets off singing into a warm spring day, and finally enters an unfamiliar bakery where she begins a letter to no one. This last gesture mirrors both Jane's journal-writing and Nelson's project of assembling the book.

Nelson introduces her relationship to Jane in "Figment." When she tells her grandfather she is writing about Jane, he asks if it will be a figment of her imagination. Jane was born in Muskegon, Michigan, on February 23, 1946, and died on March 20, 1969. Nelson was born four years later, almost to the day. She recounts the family legend of a great bonfire in which Jane's parents supposedly burned all her possessions outside her room at the University of Michigan's Law Quad shortly after the murder. Nelson's mother, Barb, doubts this story, but no one can explain where Jane's belongings went. In the family's utility room, Nelson discovers loose journal pages she initially mistakes for her own because of their tone of self-doubt and raw wanting. They turn out to be Jane's, written around 1966. At the New York Public Library, Nelson scrolls through microfilm of the Detroit News and finds Jane's face on the screen, struck by the uncanny family resemblance. Her mother tells her the spirit of Jane lives on in her, and her grandfather habitually calls Nelson by Jane's name.

"How the Journey Was" traces Jane's life from family origins through her relationship with Phil. Nelson's mother retrieves Jane's childhood diary: a slim packet of ruled paper spanning January 1960 to October 1961, when Jane was thirteen to fifteen. The diary reveals a girl oscillating between despair and exuberance, fiercely jealous of her older sister Barb, longing for love, and at war with her parents. Jane's mother, Nelson's grandmother, never finished high school, concealed her impoverished origins, and was harsh and critical. Jane wrote of her fierce hatred toward her mother and of finding home unbearable. By her second year of college, Jane's parents told her she was no longer welcome. Despite this, Jane threw herself into education and politics, delivering a searing high school commencement address on civil rights, refusing to join a sorority, and becoming one of the most engaged students on campus.

Nelson tracks down Phil, Jane's boyfriend, a graduate economics instructor and Marxist, through alumni records. Phil confirms that he and Jane were deeply in love and planning to marry. When they meet in Brooklyn, Phil gives Nelson the contents of a safety-deposit box sealed for thirty years: an obituary, snapshots, and a typed copy of Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," read at Jane's funeral. Jane spent a year studying abroad in southern France in 1966-67 and hitchhiked through Europe. By her senior year she had financially cut herself off from her parents, applied to Michigan's law school on a fellowship without telling anyone, and was keeping her relationship with Phil secret from both families, as neither would have accepted the union of Gentile and Jew. Barb's college boyfriend later became Nelson's father, who died suddenly of a heart attack at forty, a second devastating loss for Nelson's mother.

"Order of Events" reconstructs the night of March 20, 1969. Jane planned to drive home to Muskegon to announce her engagement to Phil and their move to New York, where Phil had a job offer. She feared a violent reaction from her parents and wanted to face them alone before Phil joined her. She posted a note on the campus ride board, and someone calling himself David Johnson responded, but the real David Johnson at a local fraternity had no plans to drive to Muskegon. Around 6:30 in the evening, a honk came from a car outside, and Jane grabbed her bags and got in.

When Jane did not arrive, her father drove alone on I-96 searching for signs of an accident. The next morning, a boy found Jane's bag on a gravel road near Denton Cemetery, about fourteen miles outside Ann Arbor. Inside was a birthday gift for her mother. The boy's mother noticed blood on the bag and spotted a body in the cemetery. Jane was found with her raincoat laid over her, her head resting on a stranger's grave. A stocking was knotted so tightly around her neck it had sunk into the skin. The autopsy confirmed strangulation occurred after she was already dead from two gunshot wounds to the head. Jane's mother insisted on an open casket to show that Jane was still whole. Four hundred people attended the funeral.

In "Some Questions," Nelson examines the broader serial murder case. Jane's killing was the third in a series of seven rape-murders near the University of Michigan between 1967 and 1969. Drawing on Edward Keyes's true crime book The Michigan Murders, Nelson explores the theory that the killer may have abandoned rape upon discovering Jane was menstruating, and that this discovery may have triggered murderous retaliation. John Collins, a junior at Eastern Michigan University, was arrested in August 1969 after his uncle, a police sergeant, found blood in Collins's basement. Hair clippings from the basement matched hair found in the seventh victim's underwear, which had been stuffed inside her body. Collins was convicted of first-degree murder for that killing and sentenced to life in prison, but only circumstantial evidence connects him to Jane's death. The case remains technically open. Nelson concludes that it is Jane's murder, not Collins's crimes, that holds her attention.

"Two Eclipses" traces the murder's long aftermath. Nelson's mother still dreams of Jane, who appears holding her head and asking what happened to it. After the murder, Barb began barricading doors whenever Nelson's father traveled, wedging chairs beneath doorknobs. Six months after Jane's death, Nelson's grandfather told Barb he hoped the tragedy would not stop her from having children. She had not planned on it but went on to have two daughters: Emily, whose middle name is Jane, and then Nelson. The sisters slept in the same yellow room and twin beds that Barb and Jane once shared. Nelson recounts childhood lies that echo the family's real trauma, Emily's troubled adolescence, and her own recurring violent dreams. Her father's sudden death at forty brought yet another loss.

In "A Simply Stated Story," Nelson and her mother travel together to Michigan. They visit Restlawn Cemetery, where Jane is buried under a plain granite plaque reading "Janie." Nelson sits on the grave and gets a sunburn she will carry for weeks. They drive to Denton Cemetery, where Nelson notes that the headstone where Jane's body was found belongs to a stranger named William Downing, Sr., simply the grave closest to the entrance. They stand together at the site, listening to the birds.

The epilogue returns to the dream-world of the opening. Jane's final journal entry signs off with "Therapy is over. Love, Janie." The prose-poem follows the woman from the opening dreams as she walks along a road, picking up luminous gray pebbles and pressing one to her forehead like a third eye. The sun tries to burn through the mist, appearing as a pale circle rather than the unthinkable fire it truly is. The book closes on this image of obscured radiance and unresolved mystery.