Memorial Drive: A Daughter’s Memoir by Natasha Trethewey
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Memoir, An Advanced Reader’s Edition
“Nearly thirty years after my mother’s death I went back for the first time to the place she was murdered.”
Natasha shares her experiences of growing up in Mississippi as a mixed race child in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The wonderful stories of living around her grandma, aunts, and uncles. The ways that they helped shape her with their stories and metaphors.
After her parent’s divorce, her and her mother move to Atlanta. Natasha speaks about the trauma during these years with a new step father that she had tried to block out.
“For a long time I tried to forget as much as I could of the twelve years between 1973 and 1985. I wanted to banish that part of my past, an act of self-creation by which I sought to be made only of what I consciously chose to remember.” “Those two years would be like the set of bookends I’d kept on my desk back then…” “The years 1973 and 1985, side by side, with no books between them, no pages upon which the story I could not bear to remember had been written. But there is a danger in willed forgetting; too much can be lost. It’s been harder for me to call back my mother when I needed to most. Of course, we’re made up of what we’ve forgotten too, 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 reemerge unexpectedly. Even when I was trying to bury the past, there were moments from those lost years that kept coming back, rising to mind unbidden. Those memories — some intrusive, some lovely — seem now to have a grander significance, like signposts on a path.”
The 1985 bookend being the year her mother was murdered by her former step father when Natasha was nineteen. A new life begins, one she must navigate alone, through her grief and loss.
“This is where it begins, our estrangement. For several minutes I watch her, the girl I have left behind, stepping again and again into the last place I saw my mother alive.”
“Researchers call this state, when one is in between sleep cycles, sleep paralysis. Your mind begins to wake up but your body is still in a relaxed state, and so you cannot move for several minutes. You are conscious but have no control, the mind and body temporarily divided. Perhaps this division is a metaphor for the way I’ve lived all these years: the conscious mind struggling to move on, but the body resistant. The mind forgetting, the body retaining the memory of trauma in its cells.”
“How could I think my past would not revisit me in countless ways? That I could go unrecognized in this place?” “All those years I thought that I had been running away from my past I had, in fact, been working my way steadily back to it.”
One of the most beautifully written books I have ever read. I have no words eloquent enough to do this book justice. The prose is so poetic that it feels more like a song than a memoir. I dank it up, thirsty for more.
This story dives into the human experiences that shape us into the people we are. The good, the traumatic, and how the effects of that trauma and our body’s natural protection to block it out can be detrimental, even if we don’t realize it. Running from our past is impossible, and usually more harmful than helpful. Natasha opened her heart and shared the horrendous experiences that so many face with Domestic Violence. A crime that is both not talked about and not taken as seriously as it should. She gives a beautiful voice to all the survivors out there that face these traumas each and every day. We can all learn from Natasha’s experience that whatever traumas we have been through in life, that facing them, no matter how hard, is truly the only way we can begin to heal.
“I have always loved the feel of books, the way they give a literal weight to words and make of them a sacred object I can hold.”
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