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.”
Tag: Ecco Books
Book 24: Mississippi
I recently received this memoir and I am so looking forward to reading it. Thank you Ecco Books for sending me this copy.
Blurb: 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 tragedy.
At 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.