It’s a little zaney that this essayist interrogates the obsession with violence (and *** crimes) and concludes that men hate women while she herself is pro porn and into masochistic *** (asfixiation). She also has the type of disturbing nightmares for which I would recommend serious therapy! So her credibility as a stable and level-headed inquirer is somewhat diminished by the emphasis she places on her own tangled memories and dysfunctional family (which is largely blamed on the brutal murder of her aunt prior to her own birth, but in turn this she finds in part caused - if indirectly - by the aunt’s parents' own narrow-mindedness). *-* In the middle of reporting on the trial for the recently discovered murderer (thanks to a DNA test) after the case went cold 35 years ago, the sudden and muffled up (natural) death of her father becomes an issue, followed by the departure of her step father, the non-existant relationship with her own sister, her calamitous choice of appartment that seems to forbode the breakup with her boyfriend - while I can’t find a single choice of hers that has been successful - and to top it all off, towards the end, Maggie Nelson considers in how far God has had a hand in any of the events in her life. Weird piece of writing that is meant as an addendum to the original inquiry into her aunt’s death (already made into a book before the trial happened) but stands alone as a roughshod assessment of messed up lives that are served nothing by justice and punishment. .