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About Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir
Product Description An Instant New York Times Bestseller *A New York Times Notable Book *A Washington Post Top 10 Best Book of 2020 *An Amazon Best Book of 2020 *An NPR Best Book of 2020 *A Shelf Awareness Best Book of 2020* A New York Times Critics' Top Book of 2020 * An Esquire Best Book of 2020 * 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 tragedyAt 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. Amazon.com Review Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey’s taut memoir will leave you breathless and sad, but please trust me when I say it’s worth the read. Perhaps it’s no surprise this poet is a beautiful, provocative writer; the way she describes, unpacks, and shares what it was like to grow up with a Black mother and a white father, and to have her mother killed when Trethewey was only 19, is tragically clear-eyed. Trethewey digs into her mother’s life, and her own childhood, and in so doing she gives shape to the embedded racism of this country, which feels incredibly relevant today. At the same time, she describes how childhood trauma and the fierce love of her mother shaped her heart, mind, and art. —Sarah Gelman, Amazon Book Review Review "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 rea
