Nonfiction books don’t have characters per se, but sometimes I find myself annotating real people in nonfiction as if they were personas in a novel. By that I mean: carefully tracking their appearances in the book and trying to understand their narrative arc.
In Madness, the person I annotated like this was Cousin Maynard. Hylton writes an entire heart-wrenching chapter about her father’s cousin (chapter 6) and doesn’t stop thinking about him. Twice later in the book, Maynard’s story resurfaces when she writes about her great grandfather and Jordan Neely. In this way, Cousin Maynard becomes a touchstone persona in the book that I’m really glad I annotated.
TAB CONTENTS, p IX
HIGHLIGHT and/or UNDERLINE:
“Chapter Six: Cousin Maynard”
TAB Ch 6, p 83
HIGHLIGHT and/or UNDERLINE:
This whole chapter is about Cousin Maynard.
TAB Ch 14, p 209
HIGHLIGHT and/or UNDERLINE:
This is the same home where years later, Cousin Maynard would begin to show signs of a paranoid spiral.”
TAB Epilogue, p 311
HIGHLIGHT and/or UNDERLINE:
“WHEN I LEARNED ABOUT THE KILLING OF THIRTY-YEAR-OLD JORDAN Neely in May 2023, I was immediately reminded of my father’s cousin Maynard.
TAB Epilogue, p 312
HIGHLIGHT and/or UNDERLINE:
“I thought of Maynard when the New York Post labeled Jordan Neely “unhinged” and a “vagrant” and wrote about him as though he had been the villain in the story of his own public killing.”
“I thought of Maynard again when I read that some of Jordan’s last words were, “I don’t mind going to jail and getting life in prison. I’m ready to die.” Those words weren’t all that different from what my father’s twenty-seven-year-old cousin had shouted back in 1976,
TAB Sources, p 329
HIGHLIGHT and/or UNDERLINE:
- Highlight the section for Chapter 6.
Annotate With Sara 