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.