Book Report: Memorial Drive

2. Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir (2020) (1/3/21)

Memorial Drive is a searing exploration of love and trauma, centering on the 1985 murder of Trethewey's mother by her step-father when Trethewey was 19. Nearly thirty years later, she returns to the site of the murder, a part of her effort to understand the "wound that never heals" that she has borne all those years.

The book is also an examination of race in the South, Trethewey being the daughter of a white Canadian and her Mississippi-born Black mother. It is a return to the happy days of her childhood, surrounded by the love of her grandmother and aunts and great-uncle.

Trethewey is a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet, and her prose reflects that, with some glorious description. But her language is also often quite plain, stripped down to recall the pain she felt as a teenager, when she became aware that her step-father was beating her mother, and especially in the aftermath of the murder, knowing, from a certain incident, that it could have been her. Decades later, she was given the police files of the case, some of which she reproduces word for word—no need to embellish.

When I finally sit down to write the part of our story I've most needed to avoid, when I force myself at last to read the evidence, all of it—the transcripts, witness accounts, the autopsy and official reports, the ADA's statement, indications of police indifference—I collapse on the floor, keening as though I had just learned of my mother's death. What comes out is uncontrollable: the long, unbroken primal wailing I never allowed myself back then. So I live it again in real time, only what I am reliving now is not my own feeling of sudden loss, but rather the terror of her last moments.

They could have saved her.

Ultimately, Trethewey is not just trying to clarify her own past; rather, she is pursuing underlying themes of trauma, agency, and voice, attempting to understand "how the past fits into the narrative of our lives, gives meaning and purpose." This must have been a tremendously difficult book to write, but to read it is a revelation and a bestowal of grace.