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.
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