An Instant New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book
One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020
Named One of the Best Books of the Year by: The Washington
Post, NPR, Shelf Awareness, Esquire, Electric Literature,
Slate, The Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and InStyle
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.
Memorial Drive is a compelling and searching look at a shared human
experience of sudden loss and absence but also a piercing glimpse at the
enduring ripple effects of white racism and domestic abuse. Animated by
unforgettable prose and inflected by a poet's attention to language,
this is a luminous, urgent, and visceral memoir from one of our most
important contemporary writers and thinkers.
