An extremely personal account of violence, both the racial and gender sort, in one woman's life and the lingering effects. Trethewey's mother suffered through an abusive relationship, hers more physically abusive, while her daughter suffered severe emotional abuse at the hands of the same man. No matter that Trethewey's mother notified the police, and had a patrol officer in the area on the very day she was murdered. Trethewey recounts the fallout from her mother's murder and the fallout from existing as a bi-racial child in the south. She reconnects with her mother's ghost after the officer who was first on the scene gives her the case file years later, and works through her own identity at the same time. An Obama recommended book from 2020, and highly recommended by the Dawg. ( )

Memorial Drive - Natasha Tretheway
5 stars
“Scientists tell us there are different ways that the brain records and stores memory, that trauma is inscribed differently than other types of events.”
Briefly stated, this is a memoir of a family tragedy. Natasha Tretheway’s mother was murdered by her stepfather when Tretheway was nineteen. That event is foreshadowed in everything she relates of her earlier childhood; her parent’s marriage, their divorce, her experience as a mixed race child during the early days of southern desegregation.
Tretheway is a poet. Last year, I was moved by her grief stricken poems in Monument: Poems New and Selected. The trauma and grief are also present in this memoir, but there’s also a certain detachment. She speaks of selective memory and the ways that humans process trauma. She quotes Robert Frost when describing the value of metaphor, beyond the written word, but in understanding a life. She selects childhood memories and describes dreams that go beyond a statement of the stark facts of a violent event. The prose is moving and thought provoking.
This is a book about the murder of her young mother and her own lifetime of processing that trauma. It is about domestic abuse and its worst consequences. It is also a book about racism. Tretheway was born in 1966. The times may have been changing, but the racism is there. All of the time.
You can read her poem, Imperatives for Carrying on in the Aftermath at poetryfoundation.org . ( )

The mother of poet, Natasha Trethewey was murdered in the parking lot of her apartment on Memorial Dr. in Atlanta in 1985 and this beautifully written book is the poet's attempt to come to terms with not only her murder, but also the life with an abusive husband that led to her killing. It is also a poignant story of the love between a mother and a daughter, and the many, many legal inequities that keep women from being protected from violent men.
That Trethewey has emerged from the horror of her early life is a testament to both her strength and her creative powers. ( )

This is a hard read and thus should be read. The memories around her mother, including the fictitious and missing memories make this very powerful. ( )

I feel bad for Natasha Trethewey and her family for the terrible murder that stole away her mother much too early in her life, but I never fully connected with this book. I knew I was in trouble when the first sentence kicked off a dream sequence. It's one of several throughout the book, and I just could not overcome my knee-jerk negative reaction against that literary device, my biggest pet peeve as a reader.
The book is about half the author describing the circumstances of her mother's murder (including extended transcripts of phone conversations between the mother and the murderer) and half processing her emotions regarding that loss (including an extended sequence of a visit to a psychic). Either the balance was off or the book was too short, because I found myself wanting to know more about her mother and how the events effected her mother's other child, Joey Grimmette. It seems weird that he disappears from the book when the murder occurs. I know the book is about the author's journey, but this omission points to the focus as perhaps being too narrow.
I don't regret reading the book, but I don't think I'd recommend it to others. ( )

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