Natasha Trethewey was 19 when her stepfather murdered her mother. That was in 1985.

She writes, in Memorial Drive, of carrying that pain since. Of remembering -- and of jettisoning, "out of a kind of necessity, not knowing there'd be parts (she)'d want desperately to have again."

A Pulitzer-Prize winning poet, Trethewey's writing is visceral. The first half is a slow build, preparing the reader for what is to come. This is a story that will alternately make your blood run cold, and make it boil. As, perhaps, it should.

An amazing, heartbreaking book. Incredible portrayal of the joy and suffering in a daughter's attempt to know a mother that is no longer here. A painful account of the ways in which race, gender, and class come together to determine lives and the stories that we can tell about our own lives. Even though its goals are much more ambitious than a telling of a tale of domestic violence, it does the latter brilliantly. Readers cannot read this book and continue to ask why women don't leave violent relationships.

I really, really enjoyed this title. I think Natasha does an incredible job of putting the reader in her shoes. When she writes in second person, I feel like her story is my story. I feel scared for the little girl uncomfortable in her home and worried for her mother. I also feel sad for the woman she would become. The woman who loses her mother and wonders if she had told the truth about her stepfather earlier, would things be different? This is a story of loss and wondering about what ifs. It is not a happy story, but it does not claim to be. It is true and it is meaningful. The chapter titled "Evidence" is heartbreaking. Her mother was so clearly scared and in danger, and yet that officer left his station. This was an emotional and incredible read.

Natasha Trethewey writes about the murder of her mother, Gwendolyn. Murdered by her husband, Joel, who was a violent Vietnam veteran, mother and daughter often fled to shelters during Natasha’s childhood. Growing up in Mississippi as a mixed race child was harrowing. Because she has been able to see the transcripts of her mother’s statements to police before she was murdered, transcripts of phone calls between her mother and father that Gwendolyn taped and a short journal of her mother’s, Tretheway has created a surreal story of what happened. It’s a harrowing tale, and I can’t imagine what it was like for a daughter to piece together, but I’m glad she did.

I was eager to read this memoir because I admire the poetry of our former poet laureate, Natasha Trethewey. Memorial Drive is aptly titled because it is not only the name of the street the poet lived on. This memoir is both her winding her way back through memories of her childhood and honoring the memory of her mother, who was murdered by her ex-husband after years of torment and abuse. I cannot imagine the strength it takes to share such personal tragedies with the world. But laid out in front of readers we see the unconditional love between mothers and daughters, the failings of our justice system to protect women in danger, and how grief never leaves us (no matter the distance we create). While most of the memoir is Trethewey's voice, she also includes the transcripts of documents and audio recordings. In this way, her mother's voice is also present on the page. Memorial Drive is a haunting read but one we shouldn't turn away from.

Reminiscent of "Why the Caged Bird Sings" by Maya Angelou, "Memorial Drive" transports readers back in history to a time of both splendor and sorrow. Natasha Trethewey's childhood, a juxtaposition of both positive and negative forces, comes alive through her unique, poetic style. Because of her carefully crafted, melodious imagery, certain sentences MUST be read aloud in order to give her words their "due".

Growing up in the segregated South could not have been easy for Natasha, but adulthood wasn't much of a party either. As a young adult, a devastating and shocking murder rocked the very core of her existence. Dealing with this traumatic loss lies at the crux of this memoir, and emphasizes the unbreakable strength of her character and convictions.

Fans of memoirs will surely treasure this honest, thought provoking, recollection. Highly recommend!

Thanks to Ecco Books for the free advance copy of this book.

When she was 19 years old, Natasha Trethewey's former stepfather murdered her mother. MEMORIAL DRIVE is Trethewey's attempt to finally confront her grief, and maybe, 35 years later, find closure.

Natasha Trethewey is the former national poet laureate and a Pulitzer Prize winner, so I knew this book would be a must-read. I did not expect it to be so completely devastating, even knowing it was a story of domestic abuse ending in death. The writing is full of small details snatched from memories as Trethewey tries to untangle prophecy from hindsight, unravel the racism and bigotry she experienced as a mixed race child, and deal with lingering feelings of guilt. Trethewey unearths the story slowly, slowly, until suddenly the moment arrives for the reader just as quickly as it did for her all those years ago.

One can see precisely how trapped her mother was, and how everyone around them knew the entire family was in danger but could not or did not do anything to stop it. Even with assistance, even when they were able to escape temporarily, her mother’s story sadly goes the way of many abused women, and Trethewey shows us the lasting pain this violence inflicted on everyone left behind.

Content warnings: murder, domestic abuse (physical and emotional), threats of suicide, alcoholism, racism, misogyny.

In Memorial Drive, Natasha Tretheway explores one of the defining moments of her life: when she was nineteen, her stepfather, Joel, murdered her mother, Gwen. This memoir accomplishes so much: it allows her to make sense of the trauma, it conveys the experience of growing up with a Black mother and white father in the south in the 1960s, and it gives her mother, Gwen, a voice.

Tretheway vividly describes her extended family in Mississippi and her close relationship with her grandmother and Aunt Sugar, and the difficult displacement when she and her mother moved to Atlanta after her parents’ divorce. Living with Joel was difficult, not just because he abused her mother but also because he tormented Tretheway psychologically, though she found some creative ways to retaliate. Although she never thought she would return to Memorial Drive, in adulthood, her career brought her back to Atlanta where geography and memory overlapped.

The 19th Poet Laureate of the United States, Tretheway writes in a lyrical prose dense with meaning and full of beauty. Not only is the content important and valuable, the book is skillfully constructed. It is an excavation of memory, a reminder how the anchors of the past continually inform and give meaning to the present and future. In reading this, I was at turns devastated and outraged, but I know that is nothing compared to living these events. Still, as Tretheway concludes, writing through trauma and finding some meaning in it promotes survival and healing.

Memorial Drive was one of my most anticipated summer reads and it was a beautiful and devastating tribute to the author’s mother as well as an intimate look at a woman reconciling her past and facing her grief. After enduring years of abuse at the hands of her second husband, Natasha’s mother was murdered by him when Natasha was just 19 years old. To say that the author has a literary gift is an understatement -it is evident after reading the first few pages why she was named Poet Laureate two years in a row. The writing is absolutely stunning and some of the sentences were so heavy with her anguish that I had to stop reading and collect myself, knowing what was to come.

Natasha recounts her life as her family moves through Mississippi, New Orleans and ultimately returns to the scene of her loss in Georgia. These last chapters (complete with phone call records between her mother and Joel) provide such chilling and heartbreaking insight into the life of someone who is trying to flee and move on from their abuser and the guilt Natasha carried for surviving when her mother did not absolutely wrecked me. This is a haunting work that pays homage to a courageous woman who fiercely loved her daughter with everything she had. All the stars for this powerful memoir and many thanks to Ecco Books for providing an egalley to me in exchange for my honest review

Such a sad story, beautifully written. The struggle with domestic abuse and its lifelong reverberations is chillingly told. Stunning.

Thanks to NetGalley and Ecco Books for an ARC of this book for an honest book review.
Pulitzer Prize poet Natasha Trethewey opens the pages to her life in this haunting book. Born the child of a caucasian Canadian father and an African American mother, she experienced childhood injustices and racial slurs. Her parents would divorce and her mother would remarry (Joel) and this union would lead to a world of domestic violence. We see the unraveling of this marriage, the abuse, the threats and the unbearable pain. Her mother took the appropriate measures, called the police, documented the abuse and recorded conversations with her husband as proof of his mental instability. Yet, the help she truly needed never came. Joel, ever so swiftly slipped by the police that were on guard and violently and tragically ended his wife’s life. A threat, a promise that he kept.
The author lets the reader get to know her mother as she grew up in the very segregated South. We see her as a wife and as a mother. We are witness to Ms. Trethewey’s love for her which is ever present and palpable throughout this book. Her prose are beautiful and strong as it reveals the rollercoaster of the grief and despair that she experienced.
Some of the passages are raw and difficult to read let alone absorb but this is domestic violence and this is what it does to victims and their families.
This is a book worth reading because it is also a testament to the love of a mother and a daughter and how the brightness of that love lives on.

As she says in this, her memorial to her mother, Natasha Trethwey observes "Three decades is a long time to get to know the contours of loss." Her mother, murdered by an abusive stepfather in 1985, had accomplished much in her 40 years, but was unable to unburden herself of a second marriage that never should have been. Augmented with transcripts and pages of evidence, Trethwey attempts to face her grief at this loss she sustained at the age of 19. Now, older than her mother ever was able to be, she addresses it, even more effectively due to her power as a poet. In addition to the tragedy of losing her life at a particularly young age, Gwen was denied the pride of enjoying the brilliant success of her award winning, Poet Laureate daughter.

This story was absolutely heartbreaking. The amount of trauma and devastation endured by the author is unfathomable. To be able to tell her story with such beautiful writing is truly remarkable. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who enjoys memoirs. Thank you to NetGalley and HarperCollins for allowing me to review this ARC in exchange for an honest review. I will post this review today to my Bookstagram and companion Facebook page @thatreadingrealtor.

"Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir" is a package deal of memoir, coming of age, history lesson, and true crime story. delivered by an author who writes as if her hand was guided by angels. We begin adoring this beautiful young girl and her parents who are devoted to her and to each other. Learning about the world through the lens of a "child of miscegenation" among family and a segregated home state of Mississippi, she lives in a world of fierce love mottled with a sense of disconnection.

Her parents divorce and Natasha's mother remarries and moves to Atlanta, and an apartment on Memorial Drive. We see how the husband, who is insecure, and seems unstable, menaces this only child when her mother, the breadwinner, is at work. Natasha excels at school where she is very active. Eventually her mother tries to end the abusive marriage, which she finally does, but when this volatile, spurned man is released from jail he hounds and stalks her alternately pleading to get her back and threatening to kill her.

He stalks Natasha, too, at her high school football games where she is a cheerleader. Despite having round the clock police surveillance in response at the apartment complex because of his threats, one officer leaves - not sensing any real danger. The moment the ex-husband has been waiting for.

Though highly intelligent and likely more mature than her classmates, handling the aftermath of her mother's murder, sorting out her possessions to clean the apartment, and all the other tasks that come with it take a serious and painful toll on her.

This book will become the standard by which you rate everything you read afterward.

If there has ever been a book that made you supremely sad, sick, depressed, and felt the urge to bawl your eyes out all at the same time, this is that book.

"They could have saved her." The haunting words that reverberates in my mind as I write this review.

This book can be triggering for some people who have experienced domestic violence. I am one of those people. Natasha Trethewey's use of the English language to share her pain, leaves you breathless, haunted, damned, depressed, and volatile. From the start of this book I felt like I was in her head or like in a dream... seeing her thoughts compose before my very eyes. She takes you along this painful journey of suppressed memories, and you feel the weight of her pain on your chest the whole time. This gripping, eerie memoir tells of the author's life leading up to the murder of her mother's death, by the hands of her stepfather.

This memoir is different than what I'd normally see in memoirs, as this isn't a retelling of the author's whole life, but a certain aspect from her life. The death of her mother. Trethewey is reliving this painful event in order to remember her mother in such a way as to piece together what happened, and to heal. She is hoping to reveal what caused this event to come about? What were the signs? Was she able to do something about it? Was this preventable? Could her mother still be alive today if...?

This book uncovered all sorts of emotions and thoughts. As a mom, it made me realize or wonder what impact am I leaving for my own children. How do they see me? What do I mean to them? How am I affecting their lives? Am I harming them in anyway by the type of parenting I employ? It made me really take a deep look into how my children may see me... am I doing enough for them? What if something happened to me? What will their life be like without me? Have I done enough?????

Remembering my own domestic violence issues has me grappling with the what ifs. This book scares me, especially for those who still have perpetrators out there still on the loose, hunting down those who have done them wrong, gotten away, or living life without them. The book shines a light on the mental illness of those who have suffered PTSD, especially from Vietnam or other traumatic life events, who have been left untreated, and how the state can be slow to respond to issues such as this in the Black community. I don't know if the outcome would have been different if Natasha Trethewey's mom would have been white. Would they have believed her sooner, without having to go the extra 3 steps to collect more data? Would the police officer had left even though they were assigned to stay there? Trethewey doesn't say if this is mixed with racial issues, but in the Confederate state that Georgia was at the time, I don't doubt that race played a role on the responsiveness of the police and court systems. The courts continued to need more evidence... proof actually... and they got the proof, sadly. Two bullets.

Do Black Lives Matter? With all of Natasha Trethewey's mother's success, status, career, monetary compensation from her employment, it still wasn't enough to protect her from her ex-husband, even though she had all the proof in the world prior to her death to put him in jail for "attempted" murder.

I caution those who have experienced domestic violence while reading this book. The terror in the way her mother experienced it is harrowing. Having to relive my own experience with a person who I've had to protect myself against through the courts, and having them believe his words over mine is not something I wanted to ruminate. However, this book is gut wrenching and made me enormously sentient of my past interactions with this type of violence. I commend Natasha Trethewey in writing her experience, for allowing herself to heal, allowing herself to remember her mother, and to relinquish the hold it may have had on her life as an adult.

Thank you to Natasha Trethewey, HarperCollins, and NetGalley for providing me with this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

I was really excited to read this book because I grew up on Memorial Drive. This was an emotional book about the murder of her mother and the toll it took on her as a teenager. This was a perfect example of how trauma affects our memory and how it affects us and how we navigate life from that moment on. This was an excellent read.

I've long admired Trethewey's poetry, and was eager to read this memoir. Though harrowing at times, her luminous, incisive prose brings beauty to her powerful story.

A touching tribute to her mother, who was a battered woman and killed by her ex husband. The author grapples with the events that led to her mother's demise. I enjoyed reading her parents' story and hers and empathized with her loss. I did wonder what happened to her brother as she doesn't mention him after her mother's death.

Natasha Tretheway has twice served as the Poet Laureate of the US and won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006 so when she writes a memoir, I. AM. HERE. FOR. IT!

This new memoir, Memorial Drive, takes us back to her childhood as a daughter of an African-American mother and white Canadian Father, who were interracially married when it was illegal to do so. Her beautiful prose and reflection is not to be missed - as she begins to recount and review the details leading up to her mother's murder at the hands of her stepfather. This book helped to bring her closure and to fully understand what her mother may have been experiencing as she dealt with an unstable spouse who ultimately took her life. This book is heartbreaking and compelling and part love letter and part true crime novel as the author tries to fully understand what went wrong and if anyone could have possibly helped to intervene. I loved it and while heartbreaking, it is a cautionary tale to anyone who may be in an abusive marriage. Thank you to NetGalley and to the publisher for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest opinion.

A chilling memoir that encompasses domestic abuse and murder of her mother by her stepfather.

Nathasha pulls in the reader by sharing her life as a child and teenager watching her life around her unravel.

Thank you NetGalley for an advanced copy.