Free The Red Parts by Maggie Nelson

pass one of the gigantic, brightly lit Barnes & Nobles that now sprawl around so many New York City street corners. He lights up with an idea—he says he’s going in to find the Mailer book I told him about, which he will read on the plane to California tomorrow morning. Good idea , I say, not mentioning that it’s 1,056 pages. He beckons me into the store, says he’ll buy me anything I want, on his CBS account.
    I know I should decline. But a wicked you’re-using-me-so-why-shouldn’t-I-use-you feeling has already taken root.
    We browse for a bit on our own, then reconvene at the cash register. I have James Ellroy’s 1996 “crime memoir,” My Dark Places , in my hand.
    My Dark Places is a sinister, engrossing book about the 1958 murder of Ellroy’s mother and his subsequent sexual and literary obsession with vivisected women. I had furtively skimmed this book in various bookstores while working on Jane over the past few years, but had always felt too ashamed to buy it for myself. It seems the perfect memento for this evening.
    In parting the producer hands me a sample videotape of his show, which I deposit into my plastic Barnes & Noble shopping bag.
    I take the train back to Connecticut the next morning and stuff the shopping bag under my dresser as if trying to forget a one-night stand I’d prefer never happened. The bag sits there for over a month. When I finally pull it out, I stack the book and videotape on top of each other on my desk in the Ponderosa Room, where they sit untouched for several more weeks.
    The label on the videotape reads: American Taboo: Who Murdered a Beautiful Peace Corps Volunteer in Tonga?
    At long last, one night I pull my TV out of the closet, curl up on the couch, and insert American Taboo into the VCR.
    The show opens with a photo of a truly gorgeous brunette chewing playfully, erotically, on a long piece of grass. Then a true-crime writer who has written a book about this woman, whose name was Deborah Gardner, appears against a mountainous backdrop, and explains why he became obsessed with her. He says it had something to do with the combination of her beauty and the horror of her 1976 murder. He then quotes Edgar Allan Poe, who once declared the death of a beautiful woman to be the most poetic topic in the world.
    I’m taken aback: I used this same Poe quotation in Jane.
    The show then vacillates between more lovely photos of Gardner and photos of her blood-splattered hut in Tonga, where a fellow Peace Corps volunteer stabbed her twenty-two times. (He is later found not guilty by reason of insanity in a Tonga court.) The camera whirls around her hut in a restaging of her murder, first from the perspective of her deranged killer, then from that of a panicked, dying Gardner, fighting hopelessly for her life. There are several stills of the long, serrated hunting knife apparently used to do the deed.
    I can’t make it to the end of American Taboo. I try on a few other occasions, but every time I end up symptomatically falling asleep, or shutting it off in despair.
    THE SHOW about Jane, which will air on Thanksgiving weekend, 2005, will be titled Deadly Ride. I won’t watch it either, even though my mother and I will ostensibly be its stars. People will assure me that we brought some dignity, some depth to the genre, and to Jane’s life, and I will be glad. That was the point of participating, as they were going to do the show with or without us. But I don’t want to see the crime scene photos flashed over and over again on TV, nor do I want to think about millions of Americans flipping by Jane’s corpse under its bloodstained raincoat while channel-surfing at their in-laws, up late, still stuffed from Thanksgiving dinner.
    IT TAKES ME even longer to crack the Ellroy memoir, but I manage to finish it in one sitting. As with American Taboo , there are some discomfiting parallels.
    Ellroy’s mother died when he was ten. Exactly thirty-six years later he decides to research and