Arts & Literature
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Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by: The Washington Post, NPR, Shelf Awareness, Esquire, Electric Literature, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and InStyle
A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy
At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.
With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother's life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a "child of miscegenation" in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.
Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet's attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.
A New York Times Notable Book
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by: The Washington Post, NPR, Shelf Awareness, Esquire, Electric Literature, Slate, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and InStyle
A chillingly personal and exquisitely wrought memoir of a daughter reckoning with the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather, and the moving, intimate story of a poet coming into her own in the wake of a tragedy
At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Grieving and still new to adulthood, she confronted the twin pulls of life and death in the aftermath of unimaginable trauma and now explores the way this experience lastingly shaped the artist she became.
With penetrating insight and a searing voice that moves from the wrenching to the elegiac, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Natasha Trethewey explores this profound experience of pain, loss, and grief as an entry point into understanding the tragic course of her mother's life and the way her own life has been shaped by a legacy of fierce love and resilience. Moving through her mother's history in the deeply segregated South and through her own girlhood as a "child of miscegenation" in Mississippi, Trethewey plumbs her sense of dislocation and displacement in the lead-up to the harrowing crime that took place on Memorial Drive in Atlanta in 1985.
Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet's attention to language, this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most important contemporary writers and thinkers.
Editorial Reviews
"A luminous and searing work.... In the end, we stand with Trethewey's grief, feeling it as friends rather than voyeurs. That is perhaps what makes this book both so timely and timeless. The lonely death, the personal tragedy, haunts our daily living now more than ever. Even the sweetest moments of progress seem to always be marked by unimaginable loss. Memorial Drive answers the question: How we might manage it." -- Boston Globe
"I've not read an American memoir where more happens in the assemblage of language..Memorial Drive forces the reader to think about how the sublime Southern conjurers of words, spaces, sounds and patterns protect themselves from trauma when trauma may be, in part, what nudged them down the dusty road to poetic mastery...The more virtuosic our ability to use language to probe, the harder it becomes to protect ourselves from the secrets buried in our - and our nation's - marrow. This is the conundrum and the blessing of the poet. This is the conundrum and blessing of Memorial Drive."
-- New York Times Book Review
"Alternately beautiful and devastating." -- Washington Post
"Nothing [Trethewey] has written drills down into her past, and her family's, as powerfully as Memorial Drive. It is a controlled burn of chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that will really lay you out.... This is a book with a slow, steady build. This is restraint in service to release....Even though you intuit what is coming, the moment you learn of Gwendolyn's death is as stunning as the moment when Anna Magnani is shot in the street in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City." -- New York Times
"In Memorial Drive, Natasha Trethewey has transformed unimaginable tragedy into a work of sublimity. There's sorrow and heartbreak, yes, but also a beautiful portrait of a mother and her daughter's enduring love. Trethewey writes elegantly, trenchantly, intimately as well about the fraught history of the south and what it means live at the intersection of America's struggle between blackness and whiteness. And what, in our troubled republic, is a subject more evergreen?" -- Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math
"Haunting, powerful, and painfully stunning, Memorial Drive is one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time. A brilliant storyteller, Trethewey writes the unimaginable truth with a clear-eyed courage that proves, once again, that she's one of the nation's best writers." -- Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things and NBCC award-winner The Carrying
"Beautifully composed, achingly sad...This profound story of the horrors of domestic abuse and a daughter's eternal love for ...
"I've not read an American memoir where more happens in the assemblage of language..Memorial Drive forces the reader to think about how the sublime Southern conjurers of words, spaces, sounds and patterns protect themselves from trauma when trauma may be, in part, what nudged them down the dusty road to poetic mastery...The more virtuosic our ability to use language to probe, the harder it becomes to protect ourselves from the secrets buried in our - and our nation's - marrow. This is the conundrum and the blessing of the poet. This is the conundrum and blessing of Memorial Drive."
-- New York Times Book Review
"Alternately beautiful and devastating." -- Washington Post
"Nothing [Trethewey] has written drills down into her past, and her family's, as powerfully as Memorial Drive. It is a controlled burn of chaos and intellection; it is a memoir that will really lay you out.... This is a book with a slow, steady build. This is restraint in service to release....Even though you intuit what is coming, the moment you learn of Gwendolyn's death is as stunning as the moment when Anna Magnani is shot in the street in Roberto Rossellini's Rome, Open City." -- New York Times
"In Memorial Drive, Natasha Trethewey has transformed unimaginable tragedy into a work of sublimity. There's sorrow and heartbreak, yes, but also a beautiful portrait of a mother and her daughter's enduring love. Trethewey writes elegantly, trenchantly, intimately as well about the fraught history of the south and what it means live at the intersection of America's struggle between blackness and whiteness. And what, in our troubled republic, is a subject more evergreen?" -- Mitchell S. Jackson, author of Survival Math
"Haunting, powerful, and painfully stunning, Memorial Drive is one of the best memoirs I've read in a long time. A brilliant storyteller, Trethewey writes the unimaginable truth with a clear-eyed courage that proves, once again, that she's one of the nation's best writers." -- Ada Limón, author of Bright Dead Things and NBCC award-winner The Carrying
"Beautifully composed, achingly sad...This profound story of the horrors of domestic abuse and a daughter's eternal love for ...
Readers Top Reviews
MarlytGraeme Marshal
Beautifully written. Even although I know the ending, it is impossible to put down. Sadly, it also serves to highlight how many women across the world continue to live in fear, and continue to be failed by those who should be protecting them.
LahtysSarah-Louise J
I was taken in by the cover story and was curious about how someone could stay in a marriage and allow themselves to be abused and killed. I was interested because the author is a poet laureate, but I had to skip pages and get to the crux of the story because it was not written successively by date of events. The author jumped around and went back and forth. I'd suddenly find myself on a page where she'd reflect on something from the past and it was confusing to me. One example is when her mother and biological father separated and her mother moved and met her abusive husband. There was never any explanation about how the author's mother met him and how she could've allowed such an abusive man into her life after having a previously good husband. Who goes from a good husband to a bad one, especially an educated woman with her own means of support? I needed to know how that came to be and it wasn't explained. He was just suddenly there being introduced to the daughter [the author]. Very strange. I skipped to the end because I can't relate to women who allow themselves to be abused, who subject their children to abuse and who do not protect themselves against their abuser by any and all means. If you're being abused, this is not the book to read because there's nothing to learn here about protecting oneself. This book made me annoyed.
linda galella
“Memorial Drive” is a book you’re not likely to forget for a long, long time. Author, Natasha Trethewey, is a Poet Laureate of the U. S. and has won a Pulitzer Prize. It’s a combination of the author’s recall, her mother’s writings and court documents. The effect is mesmerizing; I felt like I had participated in the interviews and knew these people. The horrors of the abuse by both the husband and the police are sure to trigger those with contemporary experiences or unresolved feelings; quite explicit. Trethewey explores her mother’s life and how her success contributed to the abuse she experienced and for the author, how growing up in this environment and fighting for her mother’s truth has impacted her own life and healing. The writing is painfully exquisite and worth every difficult minute you’ll spend lost between the pages of this important volume📚 Read & Reviewed from a GoodReads GiveAway
CG
This is the most shattering memoir I've ever read, but also the most beautiful -- not only for the precision and clarity and lyricism of the language, but for the deep tenderness and grace that shine through the author's broken-heartedness. Natasha Trethewey writes of her mother's abuse at the hands of her stepfather, and of her murder by him, in a way that illuminates her mother's life and her own. Trethewey also shines a hard light on the tragedy of American racism and how that tragedy played into her mother's tragedy, if only because of the way the law failed to protect her. This is a quietly but profoundly important book, haunting and deeply moving.
Frugal MomPaula Hope
I tried my hardest to like this book. I was excited to hear the author speak on NPR and decided to pre-order the book. I tried desperately to like it. It is well written. It simply was not my cup of tea because the author jumped around too much from one memory to another. I am disappointed.
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