Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir is heartbreaking, disturbing, and pathological but written with such beauty that the reader perseveres despite the devastation.

Natasha Trethewey recounts her mother’s life journey thirty years after her mother was brutally murdered by her husband. With a poetic voice, worthy of her National Poet Laureate title, Trethewey leads the reader down a path from which we are unable to detour. Love is mixed with fear; fear is combined with hope; hope leads to an ultimate end—certain death at the hands of an abuser.

Trethewey’s loss is deep. Time does not preclude the penetrating sorrow. This memoir is a sort of reckoning with the truth of who Trethewey is now with the imprint of that traumatic day on her soul and art.

I highly recommend this memoir for the beauty in its writing and in its truth-telling.

Thank you to Netgalley and HarperCollins Publishers for a copy of the ebook in exchange for an honest review.

A daughter pulled to the scene of her mothers murder. A couple under constant harassment. A woman , a daughter, an unfortunate life ended too soon. These elements all conspire to offer you a moment in the south where two people , one white , one black, try to beat the odds. It is their daughter who recounts not only their lives but it’s impact on her life. It is a prose that begs you forward, lifts your heart only to pull it apart through grief and worry and anger. A read well worth the trouble.

Haunting and beautifully written. This is an extremely emotionally impactful book that appeals across a wide array of genres.

I was enthralled by this brief memoir in which the author confronts the grief she still feels over the murder of her mother when Trethewey was just a teenager. The book contains her recollections about growing up as the daughter of a white Canadian father and an African American mother as well as her mother's relationship with Trethewey's stepfather, a man who battled with mental illness and ended up murdering the author's mother.

As a fan of Trethewey's poetry, I wanted to if she was as dexterous in writing prose. The answer is yes; yes she is. This is both an ode to her mother, as poetic in its writing style as one can expect from a former poet laureate, and an attempt to gain closure from a traumatic event that still feels raw even decades after the fact.

This is so sad, brilliant, and raw. Natasha Trethewey recounts her mother and her mother’s murder with beautiful prose.

Trethewey's elegiac memoir has garnered lots of well-deserved recognition. Her writing is subdued, painfully reflective of a childhood that became unsettled with her mother's remarriage to a cruel and violent man. The low level of continual anguish becomes a scream of regret and loss when she eventually, twenty years after the fact, is given the police files and reports on the case. Particularly horrifying are lengthy transcripts of telephone calls between Gwen, the author's mother, and her now estranged husband. The conversations read like a macabre negotiation concerning why Gwen shouldn't be murdered, with her ex insisting that she only has two options: come back to him, or die. Gwen had recorded these excruciating calls to give evidence to the police, where she obviously didn't find the protection she sought.

#MemorialDrive is a powerhouse of a memoir and will linger long in your thoughts. Thanks to #NetGalley and @eccobooks for providing an advance reader copy for my opinions.

What I loved about the book is the prose, the writing, but Trethewey suffers from what all good writers suffer from: verbosity and exposition without offering much details or substance other than the over-arching sense of pain and loss and sense of betrayal.

An incredible piece of writing and an incredible story. Trethewey's writing really puts you in the moment with her. This is an important story that needed to be told.

I don’t really know how to feel about this book. I think it’s important to read and it is certainly heartbreaking. Hearing the memoir of a mixed race women who has lost her mother to domestic homicide definitely affected me as a reader. My only problem with it is it felt sort of stale and sometimes too wordy. It just didn’t keep my interest that much. It’s a short read but had it been longer, I’m not sure I would have finished it, truthfully.

Some thirty years after her mother’s death at the hands of her brutal stepfather, Natasha Trethewey is documenting the long, arduous and painful process of reclaiming her memories of her life with her mother, memories she purposely had left dormant for years as a form of self protection, it seems. Here she presents her life with her mother in a style to be expected from such a skilled poet.

This is not the usual memoir as such or the story of her mother; rather it is an exegesis of their relationship, her mother’s marriages, the results of her murder and the tale of the formation of a writer from childhood. That childhood began in Mississippi at a time when her parents’ marriage was literally a crime, her father being a white Canadian and her mother a black woman. But it was apparently not a crime within her family of extended relatives on her mother’s side. Over the years, without Natasha’s understanding, her parents became estranged, separated and divorced. But both were supportive parents in her memory. Then mother and daughter moved to Atlanta setting the stage for triumphs and tragedy and a course of events that took the author time and distance to unravel, to find her place, to find her mother.

One of the interesting facets of this book for me is Trethewey’s use of literary terms or features to discuss aspects of her life. Those most used are metaphor and imagery. These often intersect with dreams and emotions of all kinds.

I definitely recommend this memoir.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

This is a powerful and heartbreaking memoir, about grief and a life cut short. Ms. Trethewey's words are as poetic here as one would expect, and they serve to make the gritty ugliness of being considered disposable - by the people who profess to to love someone, who profess to serve to protect you- and the consequences of that disposability for her mother and herself. It is a beautiful book and I recommend it highly.

When Natasha Trethewey was 19, her world shattered after her former stepfather killed her mother. Through this book, she delves into what built to this event and how it shaped her into the poet she would become. Trethewey goes back through her mother’s history and how her childhood years were as a mixed-race child in the South when her simple existence was enough to have the KKK at their door. Eventually, the story introduces her abusive stepfather who turns out to be the family’s biggest mistake. As Trethewey digs up memories she tried to bury long ago, the tragic tale of domestic violence, resistance, and ultimately grief begins.

I was captivated by this story from the start and stayed up reading it for several nights.
A Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Trethewey's writing is thoughtful and moving. I felt her loss and grief lift off the pages. Trethewey lovingly portrays her mother as a strong and fierce woman whose life was full of hope and potential and when she was gone, I mourned her alongside Trethewey. I appreciated that the memoir did not try to claim that all the author’s memories are accurate. Often having a “perhaps” or “maybe” crafted into a sequence. Memoirs are not all factual. They are, but a person’s memories, prone to error. I also felt it played into the book’s overall theme of possibility. A lot of the book is Trethewey struggling with the aftermath of her mother’s death and going through all the “what if’s?” Were things fated to be this way? Or could she have traded places with her mother? As she goes through this she slowly tries to come to terms with her grief and find herself as an artist and as an adult. I would have liked to hear more about Natasha’s relationship to her brother and especially how that was affected after their mother’s death, but I loved the book regardless.


Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Collins Publishers/Ecco for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

A searing and harrowing memoir by the former United States Poet Laureate, recollecting her childhood in Mississippi as the biracial daughter of a white father and Black mother. Trethewey questions poetry and language's ability to process trauma and grief, and to adequately reflect the violence of American (especially Southern) history. Trethewey works through the traumatic memories of her mother's murder by her abusive second husband, reconstructing fragments of evidence: police records, recorded phone calls, and journal entries.

Natasha Trethewey tragically lost her mother at the age of nineteen. In Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir, Natasha recounts the lives of her mother, white father, life with her stepfather in Atlanta, and traces their steps up until her mother’s murder (at the hands of her stepfather). This book felt like her diary…once she decided to actually deal with and remember her mother’s murder. It’s a documentation of her road to healing and making peace. In the beginning, I was skeptical because I knew this book would be sad. However, I kept going because Natasha’s writing is beautiful and even lyrical at times. I cried tears with her and pray that this book was therapeutic. I highly recommend it (although there were lots of triggers, so beware). Thanks to NetGalley for the digital review copy.

This was a very sad memoir that culminated with the murder of the author’s mother by her abusive husband. The author details her childhood in Mississippi, her parents’ relationship and separation, and then her move to Atlanta with her mother, where she met her new husband and had a son (who the author thought was her stepbrother and not her half-brother until after her mother’s death). It makes sense now that I know the author is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, as some of the book is a lot more about emotions and inner turmoil than explaining events. The book did leave me wondering what happened to other people in the author’s life, such as her father, brother, and stepfather, but that was not revealed. Overall, a short, memorable, worthwhile read.

Thank you to the publisher for sending me an advanced copy of this gorgeously honest and poignant book. I also want to thank the author for her bravery in sharing her memories, love and grief for mother. This is a powerful book that I highly recommend.

I am a huge fan of Natasha Trethewey’s poetry, and I really enjoyed her memoir. The first half is a slow build to the intensity of the events surrounding her mother’s murder that unfold in the last half. The chapters that explore Trethewey’s memories of the event and her relationship with her mother are the most powerful.

While it might seem odd to say that a book centering around a brutal murder is beautiful, the prose and artist manner that this author writes with makes for a beautiful read. The author takes you along as she tries to present the unfathomable. While she touches on her experiences as a biracial child in the South, this is more a story of survival by her mother.
The book is but a tiny glimpse and being a curious person, I long for all the unknowns yet could appreciate the path she led me on.
Definitely worth your time to read – just take a breath before opening the first page.

Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey was devastating and beautiful. It truly is a testament to the love she has for her mother and her ability to persevere through the pain of tragic loss to share with readers the harrowing story of intimate partner violence that ended in her mother's death. I am grateful to have read this memoir and will be recommending Memorial Drive as a must-read to everyone.

Natasha Trethewey's memoir is a harrowing account of the loss of her mother to a violent, mentally ill stepfather. Trethewey is a poet by trade and you can feel it in each sentence of this book. The audiobook is fantastic and narrated by the author.