Natasha Trethewey gives an extraordinary look into domestic violence in this memoir. She gives the view point of herself as a child and teenager trying to navigate the mine field her abusive stepfather laid out. She also gives the view point of the victim of her mother and the abuser through court proceedings and evidence.

Trethewey’s poetic style shines though in phrasing and descriptions of places, people and events. In one chapter, she skillfully shifts the narration to second person and gives a powerful explanation of why at the end of the chapter, displaying her writing genius.

Those who are admirers of memoirs will appreciate this raw and emotional memoir.

Thank you to NetGalley for the advance copy of Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey.

Nataha Trethewey has been named the Poet Laureate twice, which come through in this beautifully rendered memoir of her mother's life and murder at the hands of her step father. I had no preconceptions of this memoir and knew nothing of the story that is told before I started this book. That being said, I read a lot of memoirs and have come to expect a certain style and pattern from them. This book is a very different kind of memoir in that it is the story of the author's life in one specific context, her relationship to her mother and her mother's death.

Told through author recollection and official transcipts, the story is told beautifully through the eyes of a daughter who loved her mother but didn't fully understand her until many years after her mother's murder. This book is a love letter to a mother that never got to live in peace and freedom.

For memoir lovers, this book is a winner on all levels.

In this deeply moving memoir, “Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir” (2020) Natasha Trethewey, the former United States Poet Laureate (2012-13) and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in poetry (2007): explores the profound impact of grief and loss surrounding the death of her mother Gwendolyn Grimmette (1944-85) that has been described as “a wound that never heals” and raises awareness of domestic violence that led to changes in community and public policy.

On Confederates Day (1966), amid the parades, flag waving that honored the old south, Gwendolyn Trethewey made her way to the segregated part of the Gulfport Memorial Hospital to give birth to a mixed race infant. The local black American community lived in the darkest shadow of the KKK, and still stung from the impact of the Watt’s riots (1965), and other racially motivated deaths that plagued the south, including the savage beating death of Emmett Till (1955).

Natasha’s young idealistic parents hoped the racist and violent culture wouldn’t impact their daughter. Natasha’s father, a white college student from Nova Scotia, was an aspiring writer and studying for his PhD. Interracial marriages during that time were illegal in many states—yet, as the harshness of reality set in, her parents would eventually divorce. Gwendolyn took her young daughter and moved to Atlanta. Natasha recalled the longest drive ever, the fully packed car that nearly dragged on the street pavement.
In Atlanta, when her mother introduced her to Joel, a war veteran with a nervous facial twitch, Natasha never liked him. After her mother married “Big Joe” his new business venture in heating cooling systems, or the arrival of a baby brother (Joey) would change the negative family dynamic. A puzzling secret that involved Joey’s birth would be uncovered years later. Natasha avoided her step-father as much as possible, he was downright cruel and mean. Gwendolyn earned her master’s degree, and became the director of a Georgia state facility for the disabled. The new independence of his wife was unacceptable to Joel-- he had no remorse for his criminal threats, stalking and violence towards her.

There were no words for the terrible shock and disbelief Natasha experienced over the loss of her mother when she was just 19 years old. As the years passed, Natasha discovered a new level of peace after she returned to Atlanta with her husband, and talked to people who knew and admired her mother, in this inspirational story of hope and healing. **With thanks to HarperCollins Publishing via NetGalley for the ADC for the purpose of review.

Natasha Trethewey is a US Poet Laureate. She weaves words together in such a magical way that it left me breathless at times.

Memorial Drive is a poignant memoir about the murder of Trethewey’s mother at the hands of her step father.
Trethewey invites us into her complicated childhood full of love, domestic abuse, racism and what it means to grow up both black and white in the South.
This memoir is full of heartbreak, yes, but there is also so much beauty within. Trethewey’s relationship with her mother was exquisite. There is something so uniquely beautiful between a single mother, which Trethewey’s mother essentially was for some time, and her only child, a daughter. An unbreakable bond unlike any other and I am speaking from experience.

I wanted to remain with her in those descriptions of her childhood, the smells, the sounds, the tastes. How quickly a smell can bring us right back to those moments.
I am looking forward to exploring all of Trethewey’s works. She truly has an incredible talent.

I like how this author uses objects in the room to establish a time line, such as in the first line of the Prologue, "The last image of my mother, but for the photographs taken of her body at the crime scene, is the formal portrait made only a few months before her death." Memorial Drive continues to use events in the author's life as a timeline that marks the great poet/writer that she is. Ms. Tretheway blew me away with her poems in, Native Guard, and she crushed my heart with, Memorial Drive, but in a way that makes me feel human. Read, read, read this great work!

I received an advanced unproofed copy of Memorial Drive by Natasha Trethewey from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I am in no way obligated to give it a positive review.

This book to me was about the ability of a person's mind to suppress the memories that would cause them emotional pain. Natasha tells the story of her family's origins and demise in gbr voice of the child that she was. As she grows up her mind created scenarios that prevented her from dealing with the reality of the dysfunction that existed in her mother's second family. Natasha herself never really felt apart of that family. With an abusive stepfather who didn't miss an opportunity to demoralize and belittle her she needed to create for herself a narrative that would allow her to survive. She was an excellent student in spite of what was going on in her home. The worse things became at home the more estranged she became from her mother.

I did enjoy the book. At times I found it difficult to follow her recollection of the events that led up to her mother's murder because of the author's tendency to go from past to present in a manner that sometimes detracted from the memory she was recounting.

This is a really beautiful memoir by former Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey.

Probably the one word that could distill this book?
Memory.

Much of Trethewey's book focuses on her early childhood and teenage years, much of which was suppressed after the traumatic murder of her mother. The book is a process of returning to the site of trauma in hopes of a resolution, or a sense of closure:

"Of course, we're made up of what we've forgotten, too, of what we've tried to bury or suppress. Some forgetting is necessary and the mind works to shield us from things that are too painful, even so, some aspect of trauma lives on in the body, from which it can emerge unexpectedly."


As I expected, Trethewey's prose is absolutely beautiful; as a poet, she has a great eye for metaphor and description. The book itself can be circular, returning to specific memories, ideas, photographs, etc., but that's definitely an artistic choice that replicates the ways that trauma returns to you (and you return to trauma), forcing you to make meaning from chaos.

This book is beautifully written. Natasha takes us on a journey of growing up in the south as a biracial child in the 60s through the divorce of her parents to her abusive stepfather who ultimately murders her mother. I, along with the author I think, am still trying to make sense of it all and feel haunted. I want to know more -- how is her brother? What about her relationship with her father? Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers for providing me the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Natasha Trethewey's memoir MEMORIAL DRIVE simply took my breath away. In it, she writes about growing up biracial, and about the abusive stepfather who shot her mother dead on the sidewalk outside of their home. The writing was raw, urgent, powerful and I couldn't put the book down until the last page. MEMORIAL DRIVE will be considered one of the classics of the form, and an unforgettable look at the lingering effects of trauma on one person's life and soul.

Beautiful book - part poetry, part mystery. The mother's character is particularly vivid, which is part of what propels the story forward. The author is well-known, but I read this book more for "story" than for insight into Natasha Trethewey's auto/biography. This memoir would be fun to teach, thanks to the researched component.

Memorial Drive
A Daughter's Memoir
by Natasha Trethewey
HarperCollins Publishers
Ecco
Biographies & Memoirs
Pub Date 28 Jul 2020 | Archive Date 28 Jul 2020

Powerful and well-written memoir! I will recommend this to our readers! Maybe a little too sad for the times we are living in Covid19 but this book and its words stay with you!
Thanks to NetGalley and HarperCollins Publishers for providing me the ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Memorial Drive opens within the first few sentences with the quote, "Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?" This saying stays with the reader as you continue on the emotional, raw journey of grief and truth, where one sees that years are not seen by their dates, but by how many Trethewey has lived without her mother. Finding out, so many years later, the "truth" with what could've been done to change the course of their lives, is both unsettling and physically upsetting. The reader is left with the same emotions as the author, with a chorus of "if only" hanging in the air by the time you reach the last page.

Natasha Trethewey handles the circumstances of her mother's murder with tenderness and grace. I realized very quickly that this must have been a book that has been on her mind for so many years, and I can't imagine the thirty-five years of emotional build-up that she had to confront in order to share this story with her readers. It's so bittersweet that something so traumatic and devastating can result in such a calm, muted, and poetic memoir. Trethewey isn't on her knees begging God for a different outcome; she's looking completely horizontally, from the past to the future. But above all, Trethewey's love for her mother is the driving force behind this story, and it's a gift that she is able to use her talents to humanize her mother and capture the stalwart love they both had for each other.

Natasha takes us on a journey while growing up in the south as a biracial child in the 1960s. She gives us a glimpse into her life while her mom was married to her stepdad who would be her up and later shot and killed her mom for not being with him. This book is eye-opening.

Why didn't I know about Natasha Trethewey before coming across this future release? She's brilliant. This memoir was difficult to read at times due to the vivid scenes of domestic abuse. Readers know the outcome from the beginning, thus a heavy sense of foreboding is present throughout. Yet, the author managed to weave hope into the darkness. Ultimately a daughter's quest to understand her mother's life prior to her death.

As familiar as I am with her work, Trethewey continues to startle me, make me think and re-think what forms us as human beings. “Memorial Drive” is not only about memory, but also gaps (real and subconscious) in memory. A tragically lovely tribute to her mother and an incredible window into the events that made Tretheway into the woman and writer she is today. A memoir not to be missed (and I have a read quite a number of memoirs in the last few years).

"Memorial Drive" is the story of Natasha Trethewey's attempt to live a life after her mother's death in which she simultaneously tries to move away from and move backward toward the event that changed her life. The book recounts her life growing up in the South and her relationship with her mother (and other family members) before her mother meets Joels and after. What stands out to me the most, especially after reading Rachel Louise Snyder's "No Visible Bruises" several months prior to my reading of this book, is the great difficulty that we place upon women to find a safe and successful way out of abusive situations. "Memorial Drive" is one true story of how people cope with grief, find ways to revisit painful experiences, a testimony to a loving mother's strength in the face of a horrible situation, and a reminder that, as a society, we must not fail women and families who are unsafe.

This book broke my heart into a million little pieces. The raw emotion the author portrayed on each page was too much to handle at times.

I loved everything about this book and I pray WHOEVER is dealing with domestic violence to the point where their lives are being threatened can find safety away from their abuser. You deserve a safe and happy life. Living in utter turmoil is NOT normal.

Natasha Trethewey has twice been appointed poet laureate of the United States. Her beautiful words, her turn of a phrase, her ability to reach inside the reader and herself by turning thoughts into language in Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir, testify that this was a well-deserved appointment.

Ms. Trethewey takes us back to her childhood, growing up as a mixed-race child of an African-American mother and a white Canadian father. She brings forth memories of her relationship with each parent, but most especially of her mother, as her parents divorced when she was small. The author writes about racial situations that occurred in her life, and her touch on these topics is deft, meaningful, an underlying but not overwhelming focus of her story.

She tells with pride and love of her mother throughout the book, and although we know ahead of time that her mother was killed, shot point-blank in the head by her stepfather, it's still a shock to read her description. Her mother did the right things, reported her abuse to the police, kept detailed records and recorded phone interviews of and with her abuser, but he was still able, in a quick moment, to end her life.

The author tells of her stepfather's brief times in mental health facilities, yet her mother's recorded phone conversations with him pointed to a severely unstable and dangerous person who needed extensive help that he didn't receive. I can't help but wonder how things would have turned out if he had received that help.

This book is written beautifully and poetically. As I read each chapter, I kept getting the feeling that Ms. Tretheway was still trying to make sense of what happened and how often situations could have played out differently. So many times at the end of the chapter, I felt a wistfulness, and wondering, a "perhaps," in her trying to understand it all.

This is a poignant, touching book that I recommend. However, be aware of the descriptions of domestic abuse depicted within.

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

4 stars

I almost feel inappropriate describing this book as I will, but Memorial Drive is a beautifully haunting chronicle of a family living through abuse, which ultimately lead to murder. At the same time, it is also a terrifying picture of someone who is severely mentally ill, and not seeking or recieving proper medical care. It is lovely and heart-wrenching tribute to the author's mother, and I felt honored to be reading something that felt so strongly like part of the grief she still carries. I imagine this book will be triggering for some, but for others, like me, it makes me ask the question of how I can help - how can I change someone's life by simply asking, "Do you need help?"