Memorial Drive
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Natasha Trethewey’s deeply personal memoir is an indelible portrait of a scarring experience. Trethewey examines her mother's murder at the hands of an abusive ex-husband, putting that horrific event in full perspective by building up the story that surrounds it, starting with her mother’s marriage to her white Canadian father during the Jim Crow era in the Deep South—when antimiscegenation laws were still in effect. With her soft-spoken voice, the former U.S. poet laureate invites you into the complex world of a mixed-race child growing up in Mississippi and Georgia. Even when she's talking about the Ku Klux Klan burning a cross in her family’s driveway, her calming narration elevates the prose—making the entire story sound like a stirring eulogy read just for you. Trethewey’s poetic insight into the ways that racism in America has informed both her traumas and her reaction to them reminded us of Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. We won’t be surprised if Memorial Drive becomes a similar classic.