Memorial Drive
A Daughter's Memoir
Former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey returns to the murder of her mother by her former stepfather, and to the girl she was then.
In 1985, when Natasha Trethewey was nineteen, her mother was killed in Atlanta by her former husband, Trethewey’s stepfather. In this 2020 memoir the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, who served as United States Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014, returns to that loss more than thirty years later. She reconstructs her childhood in Mississippi and Georgia, her mother’s efforts to escape an abusive marriage, and the documents that survived her.
Recommended by 1 Person
Meghan O’Rourke
This searing memoir by a former poet laureate is about writing of trauma that resists language and is hard to see clearly. It tells the story of the murder of Trethewey's mother by her abusive ex-husband, and is a model for writing authentically about uncertainty and that which we can never fully know.
Article · December 2022
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